“On May 21, 1928, your comrade Cartier died when he entered a moving track.” In black letters on a yellow background, the epitaph has survived rust: it is still displayed on a sheet metal plaque overlooking the old Michelin test tracks, north of Clermont-Ferrand, the tire manufacturer’s birthplace. It is here, in the Cataroux enclosure, abandoned for twenty years, that the adhesion and resistance of the rubbers, mounted on heavy carts, were once tested. One of them was fatal. And the memory of this Cartier haunted generations of workers.
If the accident occurred today, on one of the 121 Michelin production sites scattered across the planet, the unfortunate man’s widow would no longer be left to fend for herself: she would receive, at a minimum, the equivalent of one year of real salary of the deceased, and his children an education pension until the end of their higher education.
This death benefit, valid anywhere in the world, is one of the new features unveiled by the group. In addition, there is maternity leave of fourteen weeks and paternity leave of four weeks, paid at 100%. Health coverage covering, in addition to hospitalization, consultations and outpatient care – commonplace in France, valuable in India. Or the establishment of a “decent salary” for the group’s 132,000 employees, sometimes well above the minimum wage in force in each of the 175 countries where “Bibendum” operates.
The “decency” amount is established by a third party, the NGO Fair Wage Network. Taking into account the disparities in living standards by geographical area, this living wage is supposed to allow a single individual to provide for the essential needs of a couple with two children: food, housing, clothing, healthcare, educating their children and building up precautionary savings. By this yardstick, no Parisian Michelin employee can be paid less than 39,600 euros per year in Paris – or 25,200 euros in Clermont-Ferrand -, while the minimum wage is 21,200 euros. Ditto in Beijing where the living wage – 69,300 yuan – is twice the minimum wage. In Greenville, in the United States, the ratio is even 1 to 3.
Cure of modernity
It was in 2021, at the end of Covid, that management, worried about certain individual cases, decided to examine all its pay slips. Verdict: “95% of employees were already above the living wage”, indicates Florianne Viala, the remuneration director. All that remained was to bring a few thousand people up to speed. This was done over the next two years. At the start of 2024, certification Global Living Wage Employer awarded by the NGO crowns the initiative, still rare in the CAC 40. Florent Menegaux, the group’s boss, is proud of it. “For an employee to get involved, they must be able to plan ahead,” he says. “However, this is impossible if they are in survival mode.” A strong word, which pushed the Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, to react on BFMTV Thursday evening and promise announcements “in the coming months” to “de-emcardize” France.
After L’Oréal and Danone, pioneers on the subject, the Auvergne firm is therefore offering itself a cure for modernity. Useful when you have to attract around 10,000 recruits per year, in an industry perceived as aging. To extol its advantages and challenges, Florent Menegaux is never short of a formula: “the factory is not a museum”, “the tire? a composite that changes life”, or even “the “Business is first and foremost a platform for human development.”
Convincing when he draws the future, the leader of the “bibs” is less so when he uses history to justify his approach. “Michelin,” he recalls, “has been making social innovation since its creation” in 1889. Daycare, school, clinic, cottage with garden: at the turn of the 20th century, the factory worker bathed 365 days a year in the calculated beneficence of the founders, André and Edouard. The price of his docility at work: chatter between colleagues, like union action, was punished. This paternalism has shaped the company for decades. It has little to do with the audacity she shows here. But in a group where the HR manager always makes a point of calling himself “personnel director”, the ghosts of the past are never far away.
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