At Casino, the economic lights seem to be red. As part of a takeover procedure that is causing concern among staff representatives, 119 group stores should be sold to its competitor Intermarché. At the end of May, Casino also began a conciliation procedure aimed at renegotiating its debt of 6.4 billion euros with its creditors.
To see more clearly, staff representatives announced on Monday that they had initiated a so-called “right to economic alert” procedure, which allows them to obtain more information on the real situation of the company.
“Opaque and worrying situation”
This procedure is commonly used “in the event of opaque and worrying situations: when one has the impression that the employer is disinvesting in the company, when the machines are being withdrawn…”, specifies the lawyer Savine Bernard, specialist in labor and social law, contacted by The Express.
When the social and economic committee is aware of “facts likely to affect the economic situation of the company in a worrying way”, it is entitled to ask the employer for explanations, specifies the Labor Code. This request must be placed on the agenda of the next CSE meeting.
The second step is to draw up a report to find out if the answers provided by the employer satisfy the committee or not, and if the situation is deemed to be of sufficient concern.
A welcome economic expertise
“The interest of the right to alert is threefold: first, to oblige the management to explain itself, second, to send the information back to the administrators and the auditors, and third, to obtain the right to an economic expert who allows to decipher the situation”, explains labor lawyer Savine Bernard.
As part of the alert procedure, the CSE can therefore be assisted by a chartered accountant, at the expense of the employer. “He has access to the same documents as the auditor, therefore to the company’s economic information, and can analyze it”, continues the lawyer.
Significant expertise, even though the right to an economic expert is not systematic: it exists “within the framework of recurring consultations [mises à disposition du CSE]which are three per year, and for one-off projects, only as part of a job protection plan (PSE)”, lists the specialist.
But recourse to this economic alert procedure is sometimes a double-edged sword. When the company implements a redundancy plan, the employer can thus rely on recourse to the right of economic alert to argue that employees cannot dispute the economic reason.
At the time of writing, at Casino, the trade unions have appointed an expert and “two sheets of questions have been given to the management” of Distribution Casino France (DCF). “When we have the answers from management, we will trigger the right to alert procedure,” Nathalie Devienne, from the first organization, SNTA-FO, told AFP. But management procrastinates: “During the CSEC meeting, it voted for an expert report on the project to sell stores” to Intermarché, “which could lead to a right to alert, but, to date, this procedure was not voted on”.