Search

Site map

	Single article for this keyword All the articles for Globalization

Our Union, globalization and sustainable growth

Globalization = Solidarity between all employees of the TECHNIP Group

Globalization is not a new development for TECHNIP. Since its creation in 1958, TECHNIP has designed and constructed industrial facilities throughout the world. Expatriation has always been a step in most engineers’ career at TECHNIP.

In the nineties, TECHNIP’s subsidiaries sprouted up on all continents. In the late nineties and after 2000, a policy of acquisitions changed the size of the Group, which doubled in 2001 through the acquisition of the COFLEXIP Group.

Today in 2004, more than 50 % of TECHNIP’s employees are nationals of countries with "low cost" manpower. Only 3000 out of the Group’s 19 000 employees are employed by the French entities of the Group (7300 in Europe).

TECHNIP has become a standard multinational, listed in both Paris and New York, whose aim is to increase the dividends paid to shareholders.

As in all multinationals, bottom line is the only concern of executive management and profit is based on having a rising part of tasks performed by "low-cost" centers where employees have fewer social rights and lower benefits than employees in the multinational company’s headquarters’ country, while on the contrary the Group’s leaders strive to rise in the high-cost new aristocracy of global managers (the actual holding company includes only nine persons).

Low-cost is not for everyone: the Chairman’s remuneration, as published in annual reports, has grown by + 15 % in 2002 and + 9,3% in 2003.

Employees throughout the world work with a different status, different rights, and of course different salaries.

As the leading union in the Group’s former parent company, now a European subsidiary among others, we were bound to choose between two attitudes:

  considering employees of other TECHNIP Group’s subsidiaries, where most manhours are gradually transferred, as our competitors,

  or considering that TECHNIP’s employees throughout the world will be stronger by better knowing one another and by developing communication and solidarity.

Of course we chose the second option.

The Internet is a great opportunity for pooling information. This is why we created this website in 2000, which is also intended to provide TECHNIP FRANCE’s expatriates with all the information they would get if they worked at the head office in Paris, France.

The map showing the worldwide network of TECHNIP Group’s subsidiaries, which you will find on this page, and this summary table of ILO’s website show that in many countries where the group is present, Fundamental Human Rights Conventions of the International Labour Organization are not ratified, and that in several of them, conventions concerning freedom of association and collective negotiation have not been ratified.

Here in Paris, the law requires that salaries should be discussed every year with the union representatives. A single look at the map shows that TECHNIP’s "low-cost centers" happen to be in many cases in countries where ILO principles have not been fully ratified.

Obtaining the Group:

  to define basic social standards in the Group

  and to implement ILO’s labour standards

might help reducing the gap between social standards in entities located in free-association and collective-bargaining countries and those in entities located in low-cost countries, i.e. countries where free-association and collective-bargaining principles are not or poorly implemented.

We have greatly appreciated experience sharing we could have through our contacts with AFL-CIO’s SWAT in the US and with unions in other European countries during the negotiations for the creation of the European Works Council. Approaches and methods are very different, which make exchange of information very fruitful for all.

Without interfering with the employees of the group’s subsidiaries outside France, with their own unions, if any, or with their personnel representatives, if any, we just intend to allow our colleagues throughout the world to be informed of our actions here, within the scope of the French labour laws, and to let them know in particular our efforts to obtain the group’s acting according to the ILO principles to which it committed by joining the Global Compact in 2003.

Sustainable Development

Defined by European Union as a "vision of progress that links economic development, protection of the environment and social justice [to offer] better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come".

Ensuring each entity’s sustainable growth requires that work should not be split into excessively specialized tasks assigned either to European-standard-cost countries only or low-cost countries only.

An entity doing only basic design, as well as one entity doing detailed design, for instance, will be equally in danger of not being able to survive and develop in the long run. Similarly, excessive specialization in production units might jeopardize sustainable growth prospects.

We consider that each entity should be able to win contracts and to execute a project from a to z and should be able to adjust to various domains.

Thus, sustainable growth is integrated in our goals.