The union issue is irrelevant. It's illegal to work in France or Germany without a work permit unless you are a citizien of an EU country. Systemati transportation of workers from the US can't be considred as a "business meeting" to get around this. I wonder what they stated as the purpose of the visit on their entry cards?
Strike ends at FedEx Paris hub
Stuart Todd | Mon, 16 May 2011
Staff back at work after three-day dispute over wage demand
Striking staff at FedEx’s Southern European hub at Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG) returned to work this morning after three days of industrial action over wage increase demands.
Around 700 day and night-shift workers out of the 2,100 employed by FedEx at the hub, began strike action on 11 May following the breakdown of annual negotiations between unions representatives and management.
According to union sources, this has led to significant disruption to the unloading and loading of aircraft and the handling of packages.
Flights to and from cities such as Memphis, Madrid, Dubai, Hamburg, Rome and Vienna, many fully-loaded, were grounded by the strike or subjected to serious delay.
Paris-CDG is FedEx’s second biggest sorting centre after Memphis and has the capacity to handle 61,500 packages an hour.
A FedEx spokesperson played down the impact of the industrial action on the express giant’s operations and said: “Some workers at the Paris hub walked off the job last week, but we responded by putting contingency plans in place to ensure normal standards of service were maintained and delivery delays to customers reduced to a minimum.”
As IFW was going to press, it was not known whether an agreement on pay had been reached – the unions had demanded a rise of 5% – or whether the strike had been called off as a result of a resumption in negotiations.