A two day-long strike by workers at French auction site iBazar ended last night when parent company eBay struck a deal with the picketers.
A small group of employees started picketing eBays Paris headquarters Monday morning to protest the layoffs of around 50 people announced in mid-July. The strikers, supported by the union Cesial, demanded "leaving bonuses" and that eBay pay them for overtime hours worked. The union reported at least 15 employees had joined the movement, but an eBay France spokeswoman said only 5 workers were concerned.
"We finished negotiations with the employees and the union yesterday and the strike ended at 8:00 pm," said Esther Ohayon, a spokeswoman for eBay France.. EBay agreed to pay the workers for overtime and to give them leaving bonuses, she said. However, the company did not agree to the unions demands to put a voluntary layoff package in place where workers could choose to leave in return for five months salary.
The strike turned violent on Monday morning, when two security guards broke through the picket line and then launched teargas at the strikers, Ohayon confirmed. They were taken away by the police. Employees not joining in the strike who reported to work on Monday morning were told by management to take the day off with pay.
EBay bought iBazar, the number one person-to-person auction site in France, in February for around $100 million. Not only did eBay overnight become the number one auction site in France, but it acquired back its own domain name, ebay.fr, in a strange twist of the deal. A French court had twice ruled that iBazar founder Marc Piquemal could keep the ebay.fr domain name, which he had registered before eBay launched in France but had never commercialized. The recent job cuts aim to streamline operations in France, where eBay has not yet fully switched the iBazar site over to its own brand. The US company is in the process of transferring all iBazar members to its own technical platform.
As the economic downturn continues to force companies to layoff workers, the social backlash looks set to continue in France. When Alcatel announced in last June that it planned to move to a "fab-less" model whereby it would close down many of its global manufacturing plants, French unions were outraged and called on their members to strike in protest. Meanwhile, the 1700 French workers to be laid off from retail chain Marks & Spencer have been striking and protesting en masse since April, and today learned that their grievances had at least partly been heard. The British company said today it would not close the French stores before finding a buyer.
