Long-established tension between the management and the personnel representatives, a legal conflict over the collective bargaining agreement&The BPI project manager had their work cut out to restore conditions for dialogue between the actors as the company's profits steadily declined.

Context
Observing the Damage
The factory employed 400 people in a small industrial town. Labour relations had been a power struggle for some years. Three quarters of the employees belonged to the same union. Whether this was a cause or a consequence, the management were not prepared to talk. When the branch collective bargaining agreement was terminated, the company committed a procedural error that the personnel representatives did not fail to spot - the company was recognised as having defaulted by the court of first instance. The general management wanted to handle the issue with an expert.

Task
Relaying Foundations
The BPI consultant began the preparatory work on site with the HR department - 200 agreements and customs to be listed, a negotiating position to be defined for each. Faced with the management who had prepared themselves, the employees only wished to discuss newly-acquired entitlements. The liabilities were huge, and the set of actors had to be modified - the drop in profits required the situation to be resolved. The decision was taken to nominate a new factory manager - a prepared and strategic choice on the part of the MD. A new HR director also took up her functions at the Paris headquarters, and together they re-started the social dialogue.

Preparing the Environment and Redefining the Architecture
The personnel representatives had special links with the local press that had become a one-sided vector of information for the employees. To counterbalance this, BPI supported the publishing of regular press releases which progressively rebalanced the information distributed. In parallel, the MD and the executive team "went live" and began planning a true reorganisation. To build a rigorous approach and respect the regulatory framework, the consultant, who had become project manager, recommended the constitution of a Book IV economic dossier. Its contents were built step by step around three objectives - reducing costs, increasing production capacity, recentering the business. BPI ensured the legal formalisation of the document. It became the master document for different supports presenting the project.

Check Plans
Losses continued to increase, and the project could no longer be run without changes in the workforce, and the redundancy programme approach became necessary. Book III was prepared along the same lines as the reflection already begun. When the dossiers were ready, the steering committee decided to favour the social acceptability of the project by cancelling the ten redundancies planned and recomposing the workforce using age-related and reduction and arrangement of work hours measures and an outsourcing operation.

Perspectives
Starting the Project
The Book III and Book IV procedures were launched simultaneously in order to answer questions on the handling of the social aspects of the operation. Although the project has only just begun, the first task entrusted to BPI has been accomplished - reestablishment of a "normal" dialogue between the management and the unions which have remained the same but changed their attitude. Reorganisation is coming.