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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ahamednishadh" data-source="post: 4176321" data-attributes="member: 4368">It’s an unusual and highly illegal way to get a better severance package, but in France it seems to have worked. Employees of Sony in France successfully forced the boss of the company’s French operations, Serge Foucher, into fresh discussions over layoff terms on Friday, after holding him hostage overnight Thursday at their soon-to-be-shut factory in south-west France.A spokeswoman for Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) confirmed on Friday afternoon that Foucher was still in talks with union representatives after furious workers set him free earlier in the day, along with human-resources director Roland Bentz. The new discussions are being held in nearby local government offices in Dax, in south-west France, and Sony’s spokeswoman said that management would consider workers’ demands for extended job-search assistance, re-training help and better terms for workers over 55.The factory’s 311 workers staged the apparently harmless kidnap in protest against the terms of their severance package, which they reportedly claimed were less lucrative than previously agreed settlements with other Sony France employees. Sony announced in December it planned to close the factory, which makes magnetic tape and hopes to re-open it as a site producing solar panels.The move comes as French workers show increased unrest in the face of the economic slowdown, which is not yet a technical recession in France. On Friday, far-left political leader Olivier Besancenot led a 150-strong sit-in at the headquarters of La Poste, France’s publicly owned postal service, after what he described as “six weeks” of conflict with employees. Workers have gone on strike over a proposed restructuring of delivery routes and to protest against diminished purchasing power.Commenting on the overnight siege of Sony’s factory in France, Besancenot told Forbes: “Nobody took anyone hostage, that’s what terrorists do. In this case, it was employees resisting getting laid off.”The ex-postman, who currently heads the New Anti-Capitalist Party, also dismissed the Group of 20 large industrial and developed countries summit as a meeting of nations that had plunged the world into crisis and said poor Third World countries had to be given more of a say.French oil firm Total (nyse: TOT - news - people ) sparked controversy earlier this month when it announced around 550 job cuts, only a month after the company reported quarterly replacement-cost profits of 2.9 billion euros ($3.7 billion). The move was slammed as “scandalous” by the French employment minister, Laurent Wauqiez.-Forbes</blockquote>

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