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Titan International chairman and CEO Morry Taylor has written a letter
to France’s industry minister Arnaud Montebourg, mocking the latter’s
request for Titan and Taylor to reconsider buying the agricultural
business at Goodyear’s Amiens Nord plant.
Titan International chairman and CEO Morry Taylor
Taylor took the opportunity to express his feelings toward the Amiens plant workforce. The letter, dated Feb. 8, describes Taylor’s experience of visiting the Amiens site and observing the plant workers in action.
The letter, in its entirety, is as follows:
Dear Mr. Montebourg:
I have just returned to the United States from Australia where I have been for the past few weeks on business; therefore, my apologies for answering your letter dated 31 January 2013.
I appreciate your thinking that your Ministry is protecting industrial activities and jobs in France. I and Titan have a 40-year history of buying closed factories and companies, losing millions of dollars and turning them around to create a good business, paying good wages. Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest paid, but the French unions and French government did nothing but talk.
I have visited the factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three, and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!
You are a politician so you don’t want to rock the boat. The Chinese are shipping tires into France - really all over Europe - and yet you do nothing. The Chinese government subsidizes all the tire companies. In five years, Michelin won’t be able to produce tires in France. France will lose its industrial business because its government is more government.
Sir, your letter states you want Titan to start a discussion. How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with money and talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government. The French farmer wants cheap tire. He does not care if the tires are from China or India and governments are subsidizing them. Your government doesn’t care either. “We’re French!”
The U.S. government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don’t get the duties, the government does.
Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour and ship all the tires France needs. You can keep the so-called workers. Titan has no interest in the Amien North factory.
Best regards,
Maurice M. Taylor, Jr.
Chairman and CEO
In response – in a letter obtained by French journal Les Echos – Secretary for Industrial Productivity Reform Arnaud Montebourg blasts Taylor's note as "extremist," "ignorant" and insulting.
"France is proud to welcome on its soil more than 20,000 foreign businesses representing more than approximately 2 million employees," he wrote. “Each year, we count more than 700 decisions by companies to create jobs and commerce in France. And this strong attractiveness is not weakening – quite the opposite: year after year, it is reinforced.”
To read the complete text of Montebourg’s response, as translated by Business Insider, click here.
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