Learning from Our French Friends

Here's another lesson we Americans could learn from the French (remember, they were right about not undertaking that little neocon adventure in Iraq, too):

In industrial disputes in other countries, the bosses lock the workers out. In France, disgruntled workers lock their bosses in.

The head of the Sony corporation in France was held overnight in an electronics plant in south-west France yesterday by workers protesting against their redundancy terms.

The workers blocked exits from the factory with the trunks and branches of trees and forced the chief executive of Sony France, Serge Foucher, and the company's head of human resources, Roland Bentz, to spend the night in a conference room. Hostage taking? Industrial terrorism? Not in France. The "sequestration" of bosses has been a common tactic by French workers for several years. It is unusual, however, for the "prisoner" to be someone as senior as the national chief of a company as large as Sony.