The management of the famous glassworks of La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin (Loiret), near Orléans, informed the employees that it was going to request the company's receivership. For the 230 employees of Duralex, renowned worldwide for its ultra-resistant canteen glasses, this is a hard blow, especially since three weeks earlier, management had promised them new projects.
"We suffered crisis after crisis, Covid, Ukraine, inflation, inflation. The State helped us, but it was not enough. We no longer have the markets," says François Dufranne, CGT trade unionist elected to the CSE. For more than thirty years at the company, he has experienced two judicial liquidations in the last fifteen years, the first in 2008, and the second in 2020, just before the glassworks was saved, at the last minute, by its current owner, the house French glass company, Pyrex, in Châteauroux.