“The goal is to have people totally engaged in what they do,” explains CEO Florent Menegaux

The Michelin group announced Thursday the establishment of a “decent” salary and a “universal social protection floor” for its 132,000 employees around the world.

“The objective is to have people who are totally committed to what they do and therefore have a salary level which allows them to have the mental comfort of being able to project themselves into the company’s project“, explains Thursday April 18 on franceinfo Florent Menegaux, CEO of the Michelin group.

The Michelin group announced the implementation of a salary “decent” and a “universal social protection floor” for its 132,000 employees worldwide. This salary must allow “it is up to each employee to provide for essential needs” of a family of four – food, transport, education, health costs – but also to build up precautionary savings and acquire consumer goods.

Beyond salary, the company wants to implement better working conditions for its employees. “Living conditions at work must allow human beings to have a minimum level of comfort, well-being, etc. On this, we have a lot of work to do in our factories”, he said. He emphasizes that in addition to the decent salary, the group has put in place “a system of universal protection in the event of a life accident, so that a family does not suddenly find itself with a loss of salary without being able to do anything.”

Florent Menegaux also indicates that Michelin has “discussions” with all its partners, “whether they are customers or suppliers, to encourage them to have this type of approach and ask themselves this type of question, to think about what are the conditions for establishing the economic performance of a company”.

“We had some reservations”

Questioned about the doubts expressed by Michel-Édouard Leclerc, who judges that there are “lots of presentation effects” in the Michelin announcement, Florent Menegaux responds that “At Michelin, we have a strong social value and we stick to it. And I don’t advertise or communicate on that.”

“Even internally, at Michelin, we had some reluctance from certain managers who, legitimately, said to themselves that they were not going to succeed in meeting their objectives if we forced them to increase their payroll,” recognizes Florent Menegaux. “We had a discussion to say that in fact, if the teams’ payroll is not at an acceptable level, people are mechanically less committed. And we demonstrated, by moving everyone to this salary decent, that the performance of the group is improved”he assures.