Twenty-six establishments will be closed on Saturday. In total, the job backup plan provides 62 closings or transfers on 109 points of sale.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
The French Burton of London clothing stores will close 26 of its 109 points of sale in France on Saturday 25 February, as part of a job safeguard plan which provides “maximum” the dismissal of 221 Of 441 employees, according to concordant sources. The group, bought for a symbolic euro at the end of 2020 by the entrepreneur Thierry Le Guénic, had been placed in safeguard procedure in October 2022.
will close, among other things, the stores of Aix-en-Provence, Clermont-Ferrand, La Roche-sur-Yon, Créteil, Montauban or Paris Montparnasse, announced Friday at the France-Presse agency (AFP) Anne-Marie Da Costa, union delegate of the CFTC.
The union, majority at Burton, specifies that according to the job safeguarding plan approved a few days ago with the Drieets (regional and interdepartmental directorate for the economy, employment, work and Solidarity) “221 employees out of 441 will be dismissed” and “62 stores will be closed or sold and only 47 will remain open”. The CFTC denounces in a press release “a real social breakage as long as the employment safeguard plan provides very low or even deplorable social measures while the manager holds several companies with colossal means”.
“We must make the company profitable”
For his part, Thierry Le Guénic, a majority shareholder, told AFP that the company had “been safeguarded in order to create a new project for Burton, which goes through the fact that we must make profitable ‘business “. “The 26 stores that close to the public on Saturday are stores that for ten years have not been profitable, we cannot keep them,” he detailed.
The figure of 221 layoffs for 441 employees “is the maximum of the maximum, but I think that we will be closer to 110 or 120” thanks to the sale of stores. “For me, the priority is to yield them with resumption of staff,” he said.
Regarding the 47 points of sale that the group does not close or does not seek to yield: the collections for women will disappear to “refocus on man” and the points of sale “will welcome other brands” than Burton of London. In 2020, Thierry Le Guénic also bought the Habitat furniture brand to the CAFOM group as well as, with the investor Stéphane Collaert, the San Marina shoes, placed on Monday in judicial liquidation.