The last time SFR staff representatives met, in the fall of 2020, for a legal procedure to inform them about the strategic orientations of their company, management promised them that everything was fine. Four months later, she pulled out of her hat a voluntary redundancy plan involving 1,700 people, i.e. nearly one in five employees, which led to the telecom operator being condemned for disloyalty by the Court of Justice of Paris, in September 2021.
Suffice to say that caution reigns on the eve of the new consultation on the strategy for the next three years, launched on Wednesday 19 October. The procedure should last two months. The departure, on October 13, as revealed The Letter A, of Arnaud Billard, the director of social relations of Altice France, the parent company of SFR and Altice Media (RMC, BFM…), only three months after taking office, is not likely to reassure . His predecessor, Gabriel Tadjine, had only held this position for a few weeks…
At the start of 2022, Grégory Rabuel, the CEO of Altice France, made an oral commitment, in front of the employees, not to touch employment until the end of 2023. But, since then, Patrick Drahi, the owner of the group, dismissed the management. In addition to Mr. Rabuel, thanked on August 23 after only one year in this position, the shareholder dismissed the director of consumer activities, Fabien Costa, as well as three directors at the lower level at SFR.
“We would like to know where we are going”
The purge is probably not complete. In the corridors, the bets on the maintenance in his post of the financial director of Altice France, Benjamin Haziza, are open. The name of François Vauthier, whose father, Alain, is close to Patrick Drahi, and who has already held the purse strings of SFR between 2016 and 2019, returns with insistence to take over this key position. Contacted, a spokesperson for the operator does not comment on this rumor of departure and adds that the consultation on the strategic orientations is a legal and usual procedure, organized every two years.
After a few months in withdrawal, the return noticed at the headquarters of Altice since this summer of Armando Pereira, the faithful right arm of Patrick Drahi, does not necessarily announce happy days.
After the summer heat stroke of its shareholder, the new management of the operator is now playing the card of appeasement. The first contacts between Mathieu Cocq, the new CEO of SFR, and the staff representatives took place in a good climate, according to several sources. “He said he listened, open to discussion and aware of the difficulty of the time, after the crisis due to Covid-19 and the rise in inflation”, indicates one of them, on condition of anonymity. The new CEO has, for example, promised to open the mandatory annual salary negotiations for 2023 as early as December, a few months ahead of the usual schedule. “But we know that management is always one step ahead of us and we would like to know where we are going”is wary of a staff representative.
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