"Louis Vuitton: hundreds of employees stage walkout, make salary, working hours demands", 16 February 2022

Hundreds of workers from several of Louis Vuitton’s leather-goods workshops in France staged a walkout...to demand higher wages and better working hours.

[The] two-hour-long work stoppage...involved 240 craftspeople from three out of Louis Vuitton’s 18 ateliers...Union representatives...said the workers were unhappy with Louis Vuitton’s proposal to increase wages by an average of 150 euros ($170.80) per month and reduce workloads from 35 to 33 hours per week. They further claim that Louis Vuitton wants to use to proposed working hour change to eliminate the standard day shift in favor of only morning and evening shifts.

“The proposal to compute working hours on an annualized basis isn’t convenient for us; it will simply go to the detriment of our private life,” Mireille Bordet, a CFDT representative in Asnières, told AFP. “Switching from 35 to 33 hours won’t generate additional working time reductions and will force us to work late in the evenings.”

The unions are also demanding higher pay. A Louis Vuitton employee with 15 years of experience, they say, only makes 14 euros ($16) an hour, a figure that stands in contrast with the thousands of euros an LV-monogrammed bag can cost. The minimum wage in France is 10.57 euros, or $12.03.

“The management is tying salary rises to the working hours [change],” Bordet said. “They said that if the project is approved, [wages] will rise, but if not, they will give us nothing.”

Louis Vuitton...said its goal was to create a healthier work-life balance for its workers, and that it maintains an “ongoing, professional employee-relations dialogue” with all of its social partners.

“Louis Vuitton reiterates that the wellbeing and fulfillment of its employees [are] at the heart of its social policy, and has an advantageous compensation policy that allows its atelier employees to be paid an average of 18 months’ salary per year,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Louis Vuitton intends to calmly continue this dialogue in order to reach an agreement.”