Afrosty weekday at the end of the morning shift, and car workers are streaming out of the factory gate, coats buttoned up against the winter chill. But these employees, at the Peugeot car plant in Poissy, just west of Paris, will not be returning to work the next day. The factory is now operating short weeks, due to a slump in car sales. It shut down completely for four weeks over Christmas. And these workers are the lucky ones: they still have jobs, whereas 700 colleagues on temporary contracts have lost theirs. "There's a real fear that redundancies could be next," says Georges Martin, a union official who has worked here for 33 years.
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