EasyJet Offices Raided by French Police
 

The Times: EasyJet's offices raided by French police

A 40-strong team of gendarmes and inspectors raided easyJet's base at Orly Airport outside Paris yesterday as part of an inquiry into allegations that the low-cost airline is infringing French employment legislation.

The raid came amid claims that its 130 pilots, stewards and air hostesses based at Orly should have French and not British work contracts. French prosecutors said they were gathering evidence before deciding whether to open a full-scale investigation for “illegal employment practices”.

EasyJet, which flies from Orly to Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Germany, as well as to the French provinces, said that it is respecting European law. It added that because its aircraft are registered in the UK, British labour legislation applies to staff.

A judicial source said tax and social security inspectors had taken part in the surprise raid alongside gendarmes and work inspectors. EasyJet’s pilots and flight personnel were questioned as witnesses. The operation was ordered by the State Prosecution office. “If we consider that the airline is based permanently in France, then French law should apply to its staff,” said Bernard Thouvenot, vice-prosecutor. He criticised easyJet’s British management for failing to meet inspectors.

A preliminary inquiry was launched in January amid complaints from French airlines that low-cost competitors enjoyed an unfair advantage by using UK labour laws. According to the French General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC), airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair would face a 4 per cent increase in the cost of their operations in France if they moved their staff on to French contracts. Ryanair employs about 60 personnel in Marseilles.

The directorate said the airlines could offset the cost by raising ticket prices by an average of €2 (£1.34).

French employment legislation provides a high level of protection against dismissal and access to France’s generous welfare system.

A spokesman for easyJet said: “We are convinced that we are fully in accordance with European law, which supersedes French law.”

A spokesman for easyJet said: “We are convinced that we are fully in accordance with European law, which supersedes French law.”

Since when has the frogs bothered with EC law. They do it their own way and to hell with the rules.

How convenient!
Just when Air France is launching its own low cost sub.

Yeah but Air France was chartering CityJet with Irish contracts for years,without being so touchy about the rules...as said above,they are preparing the field for their incoming low cost,Transavia.com (60% Air France-40% KLM),with B737 to start with,and by 2009 with A320...little by little,this fundamentally anti-democratic company will have get rid of all concurrence on their territory,sh@tt@ng on all established rules...more than 5000 french airmen/women have lost theirs jobs due to that,and I guess, now it will be much more difficult for them to find one on their homeland,they will be too expensive...This is unfair...:ugh: :=

Just how much of an unfair advantage is 2 euro's per ticket!!!

Ryanair lost in Charleroi:

• Regulation 44/2001 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters.
• Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations (Rome 1980)

Not much to do with the police raid itself, but I thought I'd share my conversation with the refueller at CDG yesterday. I was impressed he had been trained in switch flicking, so he went on to explain that switch-flicking-training was only part of the story. They were not happy having to stand on the ladder whilst their feet got cold, so they went on strike to get warmer shoes (honest). He then looked at my coat and commented that it did not look warm enough and that EZY pilots should go on strike unless they got better ones. When I told him I had to pay for the coat myself, he nearly fainted :) Got to love 'em...

P

Perma....I guess he probably has less debt to contend with than you? and probably didnt have to go via the TRSS or buy a type rating insert hose rating :) etc...(not a dig at anyone..merely an observation)

My goodness, you are an observant soul. Why don't you check out the thread on easyJet offices in Paris being raided!

Why raid the offices? What did they think they were going to find? Wouldn't it have been a little more "mature" to contact the airline and outline their, probably groundless, concerns?

This smacks of the typical attitude of $od everyone else - we're going to do just as we please. As Taffman said, since when have the French listened to or obeyed anyone.

If you have a grievance, fine - take the appropriate action, not action that totally screws everyone else. Ports, ATC, sheep, beef - the list goes on. I'd love to know how much Europe Plc has lost over the years due to unilateral French action.

Air France is a dinosaur - protected by the Government. Level playing field - my ar$e. Perhaps one day the EC will actually apply the rules instead of just turning a blind eye, otherwise what the hell are we all paying for?

Rant over :mad:

A4 :yuk:

Right A4. I suppose you have ample evidence to support your accusations, and are willing and able to produce such. Or is it just an impression you got?

Well said that man - I get many such complaints in an EU but non-aviation related arena, and when you ask for evidence it tends to be of the 'Well I read it in the Daily **** so it must be true!' variety...

If you for one minute expect the French to respect any rules not instigated by "Le France", dream on ( or for clarification ask Greenpeace ). The motto ere eez, if you can't beat em screw zem. This does not surprise me one little bit, and to quote Leo Hairy Camel I suspect, is why the French consumer has been denied access to low cost air travel for so long. Think of the Ryanair debacle over Strasbourg, where they were taken to court after court until Air Frog got what they wanted, and you will see that any low cost venture that gets in Air France's way is doomed. This has nothing to do with worker protection and everything to do with protecting the state - prefered dinosaur.To suggest otherwise is a great insult to anyone who has even the loosest understanding of the French way of doing things.The next stage I imagine will be daily visits on the ramp from the DGAC or some other likewise unimaginative attempt to put a spanner in the works.Vive le Republic.

zed3 ..... Brit ..... having lived 'in Europe' for 37 years ..... had enough impressions , we are all what we are and to mix into one pot does NOT work . It's all going to end in tears and quite probably , basically , due to a French attitude , amongst others , anyway . Nothing against you lot but we are what we are and the politicians (are) and want to be the winners and take all . It's a game , expensive one at that , without consequenses for those who are playing - the politicians . It's not the players lose but the payers lose !

The easyJet French General Manager was detained overnight and interviewed at length. This guy is not responsible for hiring staff or setting employment conditions and contracts. Looks like intimidation to me.

New starters employed at the Madrid base are on Spanish contracts. Interesting that this is the only EZY base not on an UK contract. Anything to do with Spanish employment law being less strict than the UK or France?

And a captain threatened to be jailed for not speaking french...

and it's personnel for future reference :)

If I was RYR MRS based , and not a little further South, I would be watching my back very carefully. Always said, for a long long time ,that a French base would end in tears. Forget EEC , or any other law, in France there is ONLY French law, all the rest is just window dressing.

Instead of debating the merits of the French actions based on factual information, such as EU regulations or directives or French national law, it has turned into a cacophony of Francophobia. There is nothing unusual about that, I might add.

The post by dusk2dawn seems to have been overlooked by all. Not unintentionally perhaps? Could he possibly have an inconvenient point? Have you tried to find out, or is just naturally assumed that Easyjet are right and the French wrong?

Do you even know the difference between an EU regulation and directive or how they apply to national law? Do you know what percentage of EU regulations and directives have been transposed into national law in France - thus becoming de facto French law - compared to other EU nations?
I should think the answer would be no, you don't know. (Are you busy Googling now;) )

Can't remember off hand the difference between a Directive or a Regulation, but my understanding is that both supercede any national law.

When flybe had bases in France the staff were initially working on UK contracts until the French courts found out. Flybe were fined 1 million euro's for contravening French law and subsequently had to set up a French company and employed all France based staff on French contracts.

When Flybe pulled out of France it cost the company a fortune in redundancy payments. Its not easy to lay off French workers. Easyjet BEWARE. Your treading on dodgy ground.

What I do know is that last year (like several times before), the European Commission itself has ranked France among the top three offending member States when it comes to non-implementation of EU law.

Then again, it's typical French attitude: if the rules suit us, then fine; otherwise, we'll just ignore them :*

What did the Public Prosecutor really expect to achieve by organising an Untouchables-style raid at easyjet ORY (apart from the sick satisfaction of having his 15 minutes of fame)? Since when do you need Gendarmes to enforce labour law? I can't imagine that a more civilised request wouldn't have yielded the same result. I can't imagine either such an unnecessary show of force by the UK CAA. Welcome to the EU's only banana republic.

Cheers

P.S.: I am French - and ashamed of such arrogant behaviour, which only serves to reinforce all the usual cliches about the French.

My comments are Page 4....

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthr...13#post1797413

Talking about Flybe at the time, but this is all fairly predictable....

Good on the French.Anything that tries to rid the world of easyjet and ryanair has to be good.I'm a Brit mais Vive La France...

Welcome back Caulfield. It must be at least 20 months since your last tantrum at Easyjet. Did they let you out for good behaviour? :hmm: :hmm:

I fully agree with FougaMagister,

I'm French too, and when I had to convert my ICAO licence in the EU, the natural choice wasn't France...and it was pure fortune that I found a pilot job there, but I'll soon have a chance to make the right choice...

I have nothing more to say about the French authorities investigating @ EZY offices but they all are a bunch of muppets making a shame of themselves...

Missing the point
 

Help me out here. Does French Labour law not require that the company contributes to a retirement scheme. Would this not benefit Easy Jet employees in the long run ?

Waiting in the dark.

FG

What irritates the h**l out of me is that the french attitude is to protect there own countrymen (and women of course) first. You only have to watch Paris ATC departures in action to realise that. If that means ignoring the EU then so be it. Can we really blame them for it?
Where as in the UK, obsessed with fairness as we generally are, we politely say; " come on in we'll give you a job " or " no, you were here first, off you go ".
Why not adopt the same attitude, " we'll give you a job only after no more uk national's have applied".

OK, so mabey I'm a bit of a Francophobe.!! :cool:

Gentlemen, there are NO such thing as a European LAW; The EU commission promulgates DIRECTIVES, a bit like ICAO does with RECOMMENDATIONS. EU countries implement those directives in their own laws.......or not!
All EU countries have kept their autonomy, unlike the CIS republics or the US of A States.
EZ will have one way to get out of the mess they put themselves in, and that is to find evidences that the French law is discriminating them in relation to French airlines. This might take.......your guess years, and in the mean time it will have to abide by the french Law, IF the french judge so decides, which is not yet certain he will.

easyjet currently contibutes 7-9% of your salary (your choice) into the company pension scheme on your behalf.

Well I heard they found Mike Szucs hiding in a cupboard in the crewroom.

Thanks Clarence for a voice of reason.

In a nutshell, Regulations have direct effect in the EC Member states. Directives need enacting into national law to be effective. If a directive has not (yet) been enacted into local law then it still has effect against "emanations of the state" (which has a relatively wide definition in EC case law - see Foster v British Gas). The State could be liable if a person suffers loss due to directives not being enacted into national law.

The French are alway difficult; they have a chip on their shoulder. I think this is because or despite being cleverer than everyone else they have never attained their true position in the world. They see the EU as a means of correcting this as it enables them to inflict their wisdom on other countries (who should know better).

It is a system where todays contribution is used to pay yesterdays pension.The system needs money NOW to pay the already retired guys. What will be left of the system when the EZY guys will retire, in 10-20 or 30 years from now, is a big question mark!

What seems a bit surprising is that Easy has been operating out of Orly for years now. And all of a sudden, right when AF's transavia.com start operations, they get raided:hmm:... this shows again what kind of dictatorship is ruling french skies.

No wonder why there's only one french airline...yeah I know there's also those charters and the likes...look at the rest of europe! How come the first leisure destination in the world got only one sigle airline:ugh:? Not even an independent low cost or some alternative to the former national airline...

As long as the french goverment has interests in the airline, then yes Air France wil be the fat lady sitting on everyone else's head...:yuk:

Let's say easyjet ends up having to transfer their ORY-based crew to French contracts. The one big difference would be that the staff and airline would then contribute to the Caisse de Retraite du Personnel Navigant (CRPN - Flight Crew [National] Pension Scheme) - which is now mainly used to fund the baby-boomer retirement bulge at AF. Since some ORY-based easyjet crew are not French, do you think they would get their contributions to the CRPN back when transfering to another EZ base? Somehow, methinks not. Highway robbery is the analogy that comes to my mind... :*

Cheers :cool:

Dude, I think you will find that many French pilots are/could be/will be affected in a negative way by such move. They are the ones who do not work for Air France in particular and for a French outfit in general.
This not a rare occurence since the Pilot employment market in France is pretty much dead therefore it means that a lot of us have lived as expats for years now(no probs here by the way).
In this case, there is no protectionism here when it comes to the "own countrymen" you are referring to.

Oh dear, such rightfull indignation. That will never happen in the Uk. There is no way the UK goverment will intervene to defend a UK company. Not even to get a corruption investigation that was getting a bit out of hand closed down. :}

I would like to politely suggest that most of you have got the wrong end of the stick on this. Even the French contributors seem to feel that the French government is behaving inappropriately. We also have the idea floating around that it is all about defending various companies. Has it crossed anybodies mind that it might be about protecting the pilots and taxpayers??

As more and more airlines establish bases in different countries, this opens up the way to "practices" which have been termed "social dumping" and creative "tax avoidance". The French action is designed to ensure that certain companies that, for example, arrange to pay either NO or very low rate of social insurance in country A cannot work in country B and use, for example, the free medical services in country B.

All that is happening is that the various little tricks which have grown over the past couple of years are being identified. Some countries, such as France, have worked out what is going on and are doing something about it. Others are getting ready to do something and some don't care.

If you think this is a theoretical exercise consider the pilot's family in Germany that found itself entrapped in a nightmare when it was discovered that they were using expensive, but free, high quality medical care on the basis of minimal social payments in Ireland. It turned out the German taxpayer is not much interested in subsidising such persons.

Whose "fault" was this? ... well the airline was not in the slightest interested (but it set the arrangement up). Nothing quite like large medical bills to concentrate the mind.

We still have a goodly number of pilots from, say, European country A, but working in European country B, and paying no (or virtually no) tax in any country. And why should the little "arrangement" between employer and employee be protected from intervention on the part of authorities in country B, on the basis of the convenient fact that their contract was issued in country A?

Let us wait and see what happens as a result of these visits before reaching a conclusion about what is going on. I think we can expect more of this kind of intervention. I, for one, applaud it.

(P.S. do you think the airlines that do this kind of thing - and I am not identifying any airline - are doing it for the sake of their pilots? If so - come into the real world!).

Boy,

I'm sorry but you are wrong. The intervention from the french authorities has nothing to do with protecting the french social security from tax evasion. It has all to do with killing the competition to make room for the new Air France low cost subsidiary.
Also did you know that a certain AF subsidiary, Cityjet, also employs crew under foreign contracts, but strangely the french authorities don't seem to be interested to the point of raiding the AF offices in CDG.
The french contributors (myself included) know all too well how things work in France, I think you should take their view a bit more seriously. One thing is for sure : the french authorities have been trying for a while to get rid of eJ, and what we have just seen is merely the escalation of the effort they are putting into it.