French factory workers bare all to save jobs

Workers at a crisis-hit boiler factory in France have stripped off for a nude calendar in a bid to save 204 jobs slated for redundancy. Staff at the Chaffoteaux et Maury factory in Brittany will use the proceeds to fund a trip to Italy where they plan to stage a protest at their parent company, Ariston Thermo Group (ATG), which pulled the plug on the site earlier this year.

"Our aim is to show there are workers here who will do anything to save their jobs, even take their clothes off," said Brigitte Coadic, representative of the CGT union at the site and the woman behind the calendar, which is due out in the autumn.

The operation is the latest in a line of colorful protest stunts by French workers after "bossnappings," threats to blow up factories or pollute the Seine river, as well as the traditional dumping of agricultural produce by angry farmers.

But Coadic insists that the Chaffoteaux action, in which 13 male workers pose nude covered only with masks or helmets, is completely peaceful.

"We don't want to destroy anything," she said. "We want to show what we can do, tell the management that, if they keep us, we can turn all this media attention into something positive."

Coadic said she was inspired by the stylish "Gods of the Stadium" calendar in which the muscular stars of Paris rugby club Stade Francais bare all in an annual display of discreetly lit beefcake.

The project also carries echoes of Britain's Calendar Girls -- the ladies of the Yorkshire Women's Institute who bared all for a charity calendar -- and the stripping steel workers of the 1997 British film "The Full Monty."

Coadic said that French workers had been prompted to action when ATG said at the start of the summer that it would close production operations in northern France, cutting 204 jobs out of a total of 250 at the site.

Major French Wine Regions

Bit of geography lesson today. One of the predominant reasons that France has the good fortune to be so good at producing fine wines is her geography and geology. This is a country which has many large regions which are blessed with a nice balance between not too much heat and too little and too much rain and too little. In part this is probably why France is also such a popular place to visit.

The result is that French grapes are given time to achieve their best and once it comes to vintage time most of the major wine areas of France are sufficiently cool to allow the wines to ferment in a controlled but natural way without the need to resort to artificial techniques that are more common in regions such as Spain and the USA.

So where are the main wine regions of France? The answer is thus:

Bordeaux (South West of France just off the coast)

Loire Valley ( A huge area for wine in France stretching from Nantes on the west coast to

Orleans and Bourges in the middle of the country and as far south as St Etienne )

Champagne ( A smallish region to the east of Paris including Reims and Epernay)

Lorraine ( Another small region on the French German border around Metz )

Alsace ( Just south of Lorraine and further to the east )

Jura ( Again a small region in the east of the country near the Swiss border and directly above Savoie )

Burgundy

Savoie and Bugey ( One of my personal favourites due to my love of the French Alps and my passion for skiing. In my opinion there’s nothing better in this world than the sun of your face high in the mountains with a glass of wine in hand )

Rhone Valley ( South East of the country around Orange, Avignon and Valence )

Provence ( Here we are around Nice, Marseille, St Tropez and Toulon on the South East coast of france and the surrounding hills.)

Corsica

Languedoc-Roussillon ( To the west of Provence on the south coast )

South West ( This is actually a really big region which sits between the Spanish border in the south, Bordeaux and the Loire Valley to the north and the Rhone Valley and Languedoc-Roussillon to the east. )

Till next time…