The bar L’Arc-en-ciel, avenue Marcel-Haegelen, in Bourges, is a hangout for former employees of Europe’s first missile company. This Saturday, April 13, memories will be shared over a quart of rosé. “There was no better works council than at MBDA. I traveled around the world with them four times. And then the canteen… You have to see the snacks they made for us, they were good and not expensive! », says one. His neighbor at the counter comments: “I worked with powder, large blocks of powder that we cut with a wood saw, making sure that the blade was never hot. Nothing to do with today. We worked sixty-hour weeks. We called our workshop “the palace of sweat”. » The man retired in 2001. “I joined at 22. They fired me at 57 instead of 60, because there wasn’t enough work at the time. »
Between 1991 and 2001, 3,000 industrial jobs disappeared in Bourges. Armament and garrison town since the 19th centurye century, the capital of Berry suffered the endless decline in the defense budget. GIAT Industries, which manufactures shells and cannons there, saw its orders canceled by the general staff, and the end of the Leclerc tank program in 2007, due to insufficient sales, did not help matters. “I was a deputy for Cher for the first time between 1997 and 2002, and a member of the national defense committee. At that time, we also wondered if the MBDA site was going to close. Almost every family in Bourges had one of their members in the armed forces”, underlines the mayor, Yann Galut. The population increased from 71,000 inhabitants in 2005 to 64,000 in 2020.
And then everything changed. In 2018, France modernized the missiles of its fighter planes, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar placed record orders and MBDA’s turnover increased by 40% in five years. The company is finally benefiting from the vote, in July 2023, of an ambitious military programming law and must respond to the urgent needs of Ukraine. It needs to reduce the time between ordering and delivery of its Aster anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missiles from forty-two to eighteen months. The same ones that were fired into the Red Sea by a French navy frigate to intercept missiles coming from Yemen. So much effort requires more hands and space.
The missileer is therefore recruiting all over the place: “special testing department manager”, “night milling operator”… In total, 183 job offers are currently available on the Bourges Aéroport site alone, which already has 2,000 permanent employees. One hundred positions will be filled during two days of “job dating” at the factory, on Saturday April 20 and Sunday April 21. “A positive or negative response will be given to candidates three days later. And, regarding operators, we are not looking for necessarily experienced profiles”, says MBDA, which provides internal training. The INSA Bourges-Blois engineering school is already working hand in hand with the missile manufacturer.
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