A staff committee meets on Wednesday August 8th at the French office of the group (Plessis-Robinson) on the theme of the reorganization of Lucent. The 1.400 employees are concerned.
The reorganization of Lucent : this is the theme of the of the staff committee which meets, Wednesday August 9th, 10.00 am, at the French office of the group in Plessis-Robinson (Haut-de-Seine). The 1.400 French employees of the American giant are thus waiting for this meeting to know what will be the French repercussions of the second social plan which was decided at the worldwide scale last July 24th.
Around one hundred posts already cut off on the Riviera
For the moment, there is no precise piece of information about cutting jobs off at the national scale. Still, according to a union-steward in an article of the economic daily La Tribune ("Demain les salariés français de Lucent seront fixés sur leur sort"), "we can guess that there will be a social plan in France. So, we are not expecting some good news."
In France, Lucent is set up on seven sites: Sophia Antipolis, Le Plessis-Robinson and the Défense in the Parisian region, Deville-Lès-Rouen in Seine-Maritime, Lannion in the Côtes d'Armor and Cesson-Sévigné near Rennes, Saumur in the Maine-et-Loire. The site of the French Riviera was hit by the first social plan (19.000 layoffs decided in January 2001 at a worldwide scale). The Octel division in Nice (around sixty people) had been cancelled, and the call center in Sophia Antipolis had been transferred to Irlande (around forty jobs). The offices on the Riviera had fallen from 300 to 200 people (see the article "Lucent Technologies lays around one hundred off on the Riviera").
The UMTS incubator project continues in Sophia
This time, the second reorganization announced late July plans between 15 and 20.000 supplementary jobs lost in order to face the activity slowdown in telecommunications. So, the answer about the repercussions in France of this second social plan will be given today Wednesday. Lucent has still said that they will maintain activities in Europe.
In Sophia Antipolis, even if Lucent's activity has decreased (as Nortel's activity, another famous telecom manufacturer), some projects are still under way. Thus, the e-services division of Lucent has maintained its project of UMTS incubator in partnership with CI Com Organisation (the former managing team of the CICA in Sophia) until now. They want to gather 15 to 20 companies together over 2 to 3.000 m2 at the Algorithmes. Of course, these companies work on telephony services of the third generation which would develop technologies with the greatest potential today (voice recognition, multimedia broadcasting, customer relation management, etc.).