Michelin guarantees all employees the pay for a family of four to live on: “The French minimum wage is not enough”

The French industrial group Michelin, a tire manufacturing giant, has announced that it has introduced a “decent” wage and a “universal social protection base” for its 132,000 employees worldwide. This salary, specifies the Clermont-Ferrand company, guarantees workers a remuneration equivalent to the “living wage” defined by the United Nations, i.e. a sum that […]

The French industrial group Michelinthe tire manufacturing giant, has announced that it has introduced a wage “decent” it’s a “basis of universal social protection” for its 132 thousand employees worldwide. This wage, specifies the Clermont-Ferrand company, guarantees workers remuneration equivalent to the “living wage” defined by the United Nations, i.e. a sum that allows “make up for essential needs” of a family of four (food, transport, education and health expenses) but also allows you to accumulate savings and purchase consumer goods.

“It is a logical commitment with respect to all the group’s employees,” says the group’s CEO Florent Ménégaux. The employees, he explains, “consecrate time to developing the company and we, in exchange, we give them the means at least for a family of four – two parents and two children – so that a single salary allows you to get a accommodation, food, but also fun and a bit of savings“. In numbers, this is a gross annual salary of 39,638 euros for those who live in Paris, while in the less expensive Clermont-Ferrand the sum drops to 25,356 euros.

According to French law, the minimum wage is 21,203 euros gross per year: an amount “not sufficient in the eyes of Michelin to respond to what we consider a decent wage,” says Ménégaux. In Italy, unlike in most European Union countries, a legal minimum wage does not yet exist: the opposition’s unitary law proposal was blocked in December by the centre-right majority.