Instead of burning a few wooden pallets and having a BBQ while blocking the company entrance, you guys could perhaps put a firewall rule to drop all incoming traffic to the VPN and having an online video party.

How could you ever trust an employee who did this with their access privileges?

A rainy day will arrive sooner or later - whether it is a pandemic or an economic crisis or a dry spell in additional funding, etc.

If you ask me I think all bonuses should be returned but again, nothing uniquely evil about this company.

Some employers may want to fire the people who organize the protests, but in France the employees representatives are more protected than others and you can't fire them easily. It has pros and cons.

I've heard about workers in France literally kidnapping and stripping the clothes from their bosses and it being tolerated. I think that kind of thing is never tolerable under any civil circumstance. If a co-worker tried to kidnap me I'd see that as a threat to my life and I'd be fighting for survival.

Kidnapping is for sure not acceptable. Stripping the clothes as well, it was very criticized everywhere in the world including France when the AirFrance HR cunt got his shirt destroyed. If you work in France in the future, don't be scared about being kidnapped by your co-workers. It's very unlikely, especially if you are not a bad CEO, and I don't remember physical harm happening. I'm not saying it's acceptable, but it's a very small risk and you should not dismiss the benefits of protesting for only a few protests that went wrong over the last 10 years.

Well the persons responsibles for stripping the Air France HR guy got 3 to 4 months jail sentences, so I don't know if I would call that "tolerated".

At the same time, in the US there's litterally an idiom for starting to kill your coworkers if I'm correct : "going postal".

So, overall, I prefer the most violent thing to happen at work to be shirt stripping.

Lulz, classic case of bad incentive: I bet revenues for online gambling are way up at the moment, now that more and more people are forced to stay home and be fundamentally unsupervised all day. But because stock markets are drying up across the board, stellar profits might well not get reflected in stock prices.

Just another reason for not basing exec compensation on stock prices.

How does that work exactly? I imagine you're presented with a contract that says "you salary is now <previous salary 0.9>"* and you're also told (or heavily implied) that if you don't sign, you're fired.

Surely the employer can't just start paying you less than specified in your original contract? And maybe if you don't sign, you're owed some benefits (but who wants to be jobless going into pandemic+recession+inflation)?

What large companies do is hold a large minority stake in their group companies. Then they shut down the 'programme' in one company and move it, modulo some cosmetic changes, to another group company.

Bitter experience.

If the business is in danger of going bust because it can't afford to keep people on then it may need to make some of them redundant (and redundancy rights will then apply), but that's totally different to unilaterally changing the contractual terms of employment for the worse.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/98 [2] https://www.bto.co.uk/blog/refusing-to-accept-a-wage-cut-%E2...

It appears that the case in question has not yet been definitively resolved, though, and the argument made would contradict almost everything many employment lawyers have been advising for a long time about the implications of the ERA in this area. Notably, that includes a lot of advice given during the previous financial crisis just over a decade ago, when similar questions were widespread.

The conventional legal wisdom seems to have been that mandating a pay cut is not allowed, because it's not a permitted deduction from wages and it's likely a breach of contract, and that firing someone just for refusing is not allowed either, because any decisions about who to let go if the business is in financial trouble are a separate matter that should be made objectively. That would mean without reference to the refusal by any given employee to accept worse terms of employment, and without conflating a position that might now be redundant with any employee currently holding that position who might also be able to work elsewhere in the business instead.

It still happens though.