During France’s long political summer of 2024 President Macron’s gamble to call a snap election initially backfired. The resulting hung National Assembly was almost evenly polarised between the broad left and the far right; Macron’s anticipated rally to the centre right had not materialised. The situation gave rise to interminable talks and political high-jinks before the eventual formation of a centre right government with far right support, effectively abandoning the previously long-observed republican cordon sanitaire. One unexpected dimension of the summer’s drama saw political attention shift briefly to the Duralex glassware factory, near Orléans in the Loiret region.
According to reports in the centre-left daily Libération, Deputies from the far right Rassemblement National (RN) were waging an online culture war on their opponents from the newly formed antifascist Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), after some of them had turned out in overalls and hard hats to support the glass workers, and posted their solidarity on social media. In a portent of future National Assembly events, deputies from the traditional right as well as Macron’s radical centrist Renaissance joined enthusiastically in the RN-led pile on the left-wing deputies, who they jeeringly accused of cosplaying as proletarians.
The context was the growing momentum of an increasingly popular campaign by workers at the Duralex glassworks, led principally by the CFDT trade union, to save their 228 jobs and factory from company liquidation. The Duralex workers and their regional and political allies had developed a business plan which they were presenting to the Orléans Commercial Court. The workers’ plan to save the glassworks was one of three in front of the Court. In contrast to the other two proposals, this one would see Duralex turned into a worker-owned cooperative, and save every one of the jobs at stake.
In France, the Duralex name is instantly recognisable, and their glassware iconic. Duralex’s signature tempered glass goblets can be found in almost every French school refectory, factory canteen, bar, bistrot and ordinary people’s kitchens since they were first mass manufactured in 1945, using the technique pioneered by the Saint Gobain company. Although they are now copied by multiple imitators globally, the original Duralex tumblers are as enduringly French as a 2-cylinder Citroën, a Gauloise smoke, and worker militancy itself.
The company shocked its workers in April 2024 when it announced that it had gone into receivership again, barely three and a half years after the first time. Back in September 2020, a rescue package had eventually been put together by International Cookware, owners of Duralex’s more internationally known rival Pyrex.
Management versus workers
François Dufranne is a Duralex sand blaster and shop steward for the CGT trade union. Speaking to journalist Khedidja Zerouali from the left-leaning investigative Médiapart, Dufranne said that at first he thought Pyrex’s business plan seemed serious “but they assumed Duralex could adapt overnight. Pyrex uses annealed glass, which allows quick changes. We work with tempered glass – production shifts take much longer, and with only two lines, we’re forced into large batches."
Also speaking to Médiapart, Suliman El Moussaoui, machine operator and shop steward for the CFDT trade union said “management of the factory has been chaotic in recent years - each new company put its own interests over the interests of Duralex and its workers. On a business level, they rested on their laurels and didn’t invest in innovation”. A 2022 external audit, commissioned by Pyrex but not fully shared with the workforce, found deficiencies and made recommendations that were largely not acted on.
The first external signs of renewed trouble under Pyrex had appeared in November 2022 when the Ukraine war and soaring energy prices led senior management to decide to idle the furnaces for five months and furlough the workers. That this was done in spite of having received over €15 million in state aid did not endear the workers to Pyrex. Months of uncertainty culminated in the receivership announcement in April 2024. In the light of this, later news that the two corporate rescue proposals being brought to the Commercial Court by tableware companies would involve significant lay-offs only confirmed workers’ worst fears about corporate “rescues”.
Led by Suliman El Moussaoui and the CFDT, most of the workers at the glassworks were determined to demonstrate that Duralex had huge untapped potential, and worked together with their allies in site management to formulate a proposal for forming a Scop (Société coopérative et participative - a worker owned cooperative) complete with a business plan and pledge to “diversify products, expand markets, and develop partnerships”. They sought, and found, regional partners for a rescue package, arguing that Duralex is an integral part of the region’s heritage.
The campaign worked. On July 26, the Orléans Commercial Court voted to accept the CFDT-led proposal to form a Scop, which included material support pledged by others, including the regional authorities, the city of Orléans and La Poste, the state-owned postal service. La Poste offered Duralex shelf space in post offices, and space on their website to showcase the Duralex range. Duralex was saved. The workers were elated, national TV visited the site, the regional government congratulated the workers, and initially sales went through the roof. “We are taking our destiny into our own hands. We want to show the old leaders that we can succeed” El Moussaoui told Médiapart.
A workers’ cooperative in a market system
But, as critics inside and outside of Duralex were quick to point out, the fundamentals of the business need to be addressed if the enterprise is to thrive in the long run. The workers agreed, and the new Scop hired a strategy director to revive international markets. Closer to home, support continued to be mobilised as local businesses including hostelries pledged to buy all their glassware from Duralex, and the banks, reassured by local investment and the changes already afoot, gave loans for investing in the significant changes needed for further production improvement and expansion.
It won’t be an easy journey, the proud new owners of Duralex say so themselves, but it is clear from their story that accepting the constraints of neoliberal dogma was a non-runner given their previous experiences. Presented with variations on the option of a return to corporate domination and more subjugation to the priorities of shareholders, they chose instead to seize the opportunity to forge their own destiny as the masters of the industry that they know best how to run.
In Ireland in recent decades we have seen the closure of several glassworks, including Waterford Crystal, Camden Glass in Benburb and the Irish Glass Bottle Company in Ringsend. The Irish Glass facility in Ringsend was itself the site of a worker occupation in 2002 when its parent company Ardagh, who were still turning a profit, refused to pay the redundancy rates stipulated by the Labour Relations Court.
The closures have not just impacted negatively on the several hundred workers who lost their jobs, the loss of skills and the losses to local economies, they have also seriously undermined our ability to meet our glass recycling targets under the national glass recycling programme. The Republic of Ireland now exports the bulk of the 43,000 tonnes of glass recycling produced each year. The reasons cited by Ardagh for the closure of Ringsend facility read like a neoliberal crib sheet; the unions wouldn’t accept the shareholders' conditions, the need to remain competitive in a global market etc. By accepting these orthodoxies, the Irish political class has embraced the Thatcherite maxim that “There Is No Alternative”. The result has been the closure of workplaces, and a deteriorating economy and environment, impacting the lives of countless workers.
But the Duralex workers in France have shown that there is another way to run an enterprise, a way in which workers exercising their autonomy prioritise their needs and those of the community rather than shareholders’. Company law in France and Ireland may be different, and we don’t have quite the same system of Commercial Courts in either part of this island. But the determination and creativity of the workers at Duralex have shown us that orthodoxies can be overcome, and certainties can evaporate. Not everyone at Duralex had been on board with the Scop project to begin with. François Dufranne, the sand blaster and CGT shop steward had initially been sceptical about its viability. Now, he says, he wants it to succeed.
(With special thanks to Khedidja Zerouali, Médiapart).
Shane OCurry is a political activist who has worked in human rights in the north and south of Ireland for 25 years.