Laurent Ruau has swept the lobby for the visit. Touching attention, though a little vain. In its pot, a withered plant wears a garland missed, an unlikely Christmas tree. The guard looks at her, smiling. It’s been there since 1989 and, in his eyes, we think we see pass the shadows of the 1,700 employees who worked there, the collar-white by the stairs, the blue-collar workers by the wide hallway in the basement they called ” the underground “.
At this time, Thomson Angers still produced tvs. Since 1957, in addition to the electric razors and radios, millions of screens out of the production lines to equip the French homes, and beyond. Has its zenith in the 1970s, the factory employed up to 3,500 people. On October 11, 2012, when the tribunal de commerce of Nanterre shall pronounce the liquidation of the subsidiary of anjou, which became Technicolor in 2010, they are no more than 350. The ultimate victims of an electron activity, which has continued to decline in France for the past thirty years. A few months earlier, Orange has removed the manufacture of his box, sealing their fate.
In Angers, where he had painfully lived through the end of ACT Manufacturing (ex-Bull Electronics) and the dismissal of 660 employees, ten years earlier, the pill is bitter. One month before the liquidation, the elected officials of the city, the agglomeration and the region, communities still all in the hands of the left, burst a full-page ad in the World, and The Echos for tancer, the head of the group, Frederic Rose : “Why Technicolor does he not to the possibilities to innovate and produce in France ? Why Technicolor does he want to close suddenly its plant in Angers, with 350 employees ? Why Technicolor has moved ? “
“It eats, it destroys, it cannibalizes ”
When asked about these 70 000 eurosdépensés in advertising, the elected vengeance would be justified as well : “The…
