French workers strip to try to save their jobs

PARIS: Workers at a struggling heater factory in northwest France are taking it all off in a bid to save their jobs and posed nude for a calendar to call attention to their plight.

Mr February is wearing nothing but a cardboard box. Mr October is posed like the famed Rodin sculpture "The Thinker." Mr April is naked but for a flag bearing the company's logo, flowing in front of his lower body.

Their protest is the latest and barest, effort by French workers to fight back at the economic downturn. Employees have locked up their bosses, threatened to blow up factories and blocked oil supplies in scattered incidents around France in recent months.

After receiving the news in June that they might be laid off, the workers at the Chaffoteaux factory took a creative approach to show their displeasure. The company, which makes gas and water heating equipment, is facing declining demand amid a slump in real estate sales and a shift in French households away from gas heaters.

Fifteen men who work at the factory in Ploufragan, 450 kilometres west of Paris, posed for the calendar. Five thousand copies were printed and 2,000 had been sold at euro7 each as of today, three days after they were made available.

Brigitte Coadic, the representative from the CGT labour union that organised the calendar, said the workers want to attract public attention to the layoffs in the hope that will help them in negotiations with the management.