2023-10-11 21:41:35
The entrance to the Nestlé Waters factory in Vittel (Vosges), in May 2023. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN / AFP
For a long time, job cuts at Nestlé Waters were carried out quietly. Departures were never forced, the unions negotiated comfortable “end-of-career leave”, a kind of early retirement. This is how the Vittel-Contrexéville (Vosges) establishment reduced its workforce by three quarters in twenty-five years, including a quarter in the last four years, going from 1,000 to 720 employees, without incident.
But times are changing. Nestlé Waters employees have been on strike since the end of August. And demonstrated several times, even in front of the Nestlé France headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine), on October 2, once morest a reorganization plan providing for 171 departures, the majority of which were layoffs. “A shock for the territory”testifies the mayor of Contrexéville, Luc Gerecke.
What led to these job cuts? “The end of the marketing of the Vittel brand in Germany announced in 2022, and the intensification of climatic hazards which may impact the operating conditions of some of our shallow drilling”explains Nestlé Waters.
The illusion of an inexhaustible resource
Let’s go back a little. For a long time, Vittel and Contrexéville lived under the illusion that water was an inexhaustible resource. On this natural treasure, the fortunes of the two spa towns and that of the Swiss multinational, which acquired a stake in the Vittel water company in 1969, before taking control of it in 1992, were built.
Billions of liters of water have been bottled and marketed under the Vittel, Contrex and Hépar brands without anticipating any drying up. The first observations from the geological and mining research office of excessive sampling in the main aquifer, known as “Lower Triassic sandstone” or “GTI”, date back to the 1970s. “We have to get back into the spirit of the times, we didn’t have this long-term visionconfesses the mayor of Contrexéville. Little by little, consciousness awakened. »
Read also (2012): Nestlé and the bottled water business
From report to report, today no one disputes that, as the Vosges prefecture explains, “the part of the water table in the Vittel – Contréxeville sector is in quantitative deficit [le volume prélevé est supérieur au volume d’alimentation] linked to pumping used for drinking water supply, water bottling and the food industry. Nestlé thus declares having reduced its withdrawals by 23% since 2010.
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