ReportingOn the site of the former factory of the American group, three elected officials continue to monitor the reclassification of the last workers. Alone in an abandoned factory with a human resources manager.
Monday, chicken fillet with Comté and bacon. Tuesday, pork pancake with herbs. Wednesday, barbecue plate. The menu for the week is there, pinned up in front of the canteen. This Friday, December 17, the rows of wooden tables and chairs have not moved, it looks like the service has just ended. But the air is frozen, the heating does not work any more nor the light. No one has been coming to lunch for a long time. The hundreds of workers who manufactured “made in France” clothes dryers, on this site in the north-west of Amiens, for the American group Whirlpool, have all left the premises, as the buyers went bankrupt, the one after the other.
Here, time has stood still. In abandoned offices, graphics drawn in felt-tip pen on a blackboard tell a computer story, a possible vestige of a meeting with visiting consultants. The glass doors to the entrance are locked in the ajar position, letting in the damp cold of winter. The tiled floor in the hall is in poor condition. All around, grasses invade and crack the stone paths, in the middle of which sometimes flees a cat or a bird. The parking lot is empty and silent. The same one where the second round of the 2017 presidential election was played out, it was said, when Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron clashed there by interposed cameras, shortly after Whirlpool announced to relocate all activity in Poland.
An end of the world painting
In this end-of-the-world painting, a desk is lit. Only one, on the first floor. A spot of light in this windswept 17 hectare site, where nearly 1,500 workers worked twenty years ago. This is the room where the last three Whirlpool employees meet each day, smelling of reheated coffee. Three union representatives, who cohabit with a human resources manager, on the lower floor, responsible, since 2016, to close the site. Him too, all alone. Like the three elected officials, his presence is compulsory to organize the reclassification of the last workers. He will be leaving in a few weeks. That day, his office with a view of the wasteland was turned off. “He lives in Paris”, assures François Gorlia, CGT delegate, who grew up on the site, his father was the guardian. “You, your house, it’s here, you’ll never leave “, said teasing Frédéric Chantrelle, his colleague from the CFDT.
Since their economic dismissal was canceled by the administrative court in March, the three elected officials had to be reinstated in the company, which however no longer has any activity in Amiens. The last survivors of the storm, they continue to come daily to this totally deserted site. The metropolis of Amiens, which recovered most of it, authorized them to do so.
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