EUROPE IMAGES INTERNATIONAL - M5

Synopsis

Pension funds, relocation and globalisation have now become a daily part of our vocabulary, but they remain abstract, often anguishing notions, for they rhyme with factory closures, massive job losses and the desertification of whole regions.
Through the rather untypical eyes of a company boss from Haute-Savoie in the French Alps, the film talks about this recent phase of capitalism dominated by global and implacable financial mechanisms.
In the Arve Valley 12,000 employees still work in 500 turning industries supplying precision spare parts to the giants of the automobile, aerospace and medical industries. But for how much longer?
Victims of their own success, most of these companies have already been bought up by British and American pension funds whose only concern is maximum profitability in record time. The company's sustainability and job preservation which until very recently were the main concerns of the valley's bosses are no longer part of the concerns of anonymous and distant shareholders. The result is shock and concern.
Just as worrying is the pressure applied by automobile makers for the turning companies to relocate their activities abroad (to China, for example, or the eastern European countries). Giving in means axing hundreds of jobs. Resisting will lead to the cancellation of orders and bankruptcy. Trapped by threats from all sides and unable to stand up to them, a good number of Arve businessmen are beginning to wonder if they haven't been surpassed by an economic model that they had supported for so long.

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