Would you consider locking up your boss? Photograph: Max Nash/AP
You have to hand it to the French. Here in the UK, if our managers were to announce job cuts you might expect anger, resentment and perhaps strike action, but would we go so far as to hold the boss hostage until they reconsidered? Well that's what happened across the Channel, where the British boss of a car parts company was locked in his factory for 48 hours after employees realised he was shipping work out to a cheaper plant in Slovakia.
Astonishingly, it's not even the first time this year that a British boss working in France has been held captive in this way, after the director of an ice cream factory in Champagne-Ardenne was frogmarched by workers to his office and locked in overnight after announcing redundancies.
Behind these extraordinary incidents seems to be a wider discomfort in France about globalisation and the use of cheap overseas labour, apparently seen as the bidding of devious "Anglo-Saxon" free-traders.
In this respect I'm not so sure French bosses are entirely blameless. Nor are French businesses afraid to make foreign workers redundant, as anyone who used to work at the Peugeot Citroën plant in Coventry will tell you.
The French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to kick-start the country's economy by relaxing strict labour laws, but public opposition is strong. Are French workers right to take an aggressive protectionist stance towards domestic jobs and businesses? Should workers in other developed economies be following their lead? Or do the French need to wake up to the harsh realities of global economics?
