AFP, published on Friday, September 09, 2022 at 9:37 p.m.
“Get started in the luxury leather goods industry, no experience required, send your CV”. The Sofama company is displayed in 4×3 on the panels of Saint-Etienne (Loire), in the hope of alleviating the shortage of labor which affects the subcontractors of high-end leather, in the region as elsewhere in France.
“This approach is a first for us, because luxury traditionally evolves in discretion. But we must find solutions to attract new candidates”, explains to AFP Vincent Rabérin, the boss of Sofama, who works with large houses. luxury.
With a growing workforce – 140 employees when the company took over in 2010, more than 1,000 today – and a turnover of 70 million euros, he is one of those who have fully benefited from the success of French luxury in Asia and America. The sector is dominated by the performance of Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Chanel… main contractors for subcontractors.
“With a double-digit annual growth rate over the past decade, recruitment has become the main problem for these subcontractors, more than the supply of quality raw materials”, notes Thierry Voisin, training director at the Technical Center of the Leather.
Sofama must thus make about fifty recruitments by the end of the year. After the 4x3s, a poster campaign is planned in bus shelters in the Vichy region, where three of its workshops are located.
His boss is convinced of this: “we must make our sector and its outlets known, and make it globally more attractive through remuneration of course but also career plans, by changing our business model”.
– “Cult of secrecy” –
A member of the CGT textile and leather goods federation, Thomas Vacheron also sees the labor shortage as an opportunity for the big houses to “reduce their margins for the benefit of subcontractors”. And to reduce “the pressure on production rates so that these jobs become more attractive”.
According to him, there is a “real problem of purchasing power” for “employees who travel long distances to get to workshops located in rural areas”, against remuneration barely above the minimum wage.
The Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region concentrates a large part of French production of high-end leather goods, with nearly 7,500 employees”, out of the 27,000 identified in France, according to figures from Pôle Emploi.
“We are trying to encourage vocations, especially among men who are still few in these manual leatherwork trades where great needs are felt”, explains Fathi Janier, Industry project manager at the regional management of Pôle Emploi.
His advice to employers is to “communicate on social networks”, but the cult of secrecy remains significant in an industrial world constrained by confidentiality commitments and security imperatives.
To protect itself from covetousness, a Puy-de-Dôme subcontractor thus assumes that it does not have a website. Another refuses to comment on the next construction of a large workshop in the region of Saint-Etienne.
Isabelle Allard, Sofama’s HRD, insists on training and hopes “that the National Education expand its initial training offer in leather goods from the CAP to the BTS via the Bac Pro”, in parallel with that intended for job seekers or to professional retraining.
In the meantime, like several big houses, the company has created its own training structure, the “SB Academy” and trained more than 600 people since 2017.
Despite a year 2020 marked by many weeks of production stoppage, the health crisis has not slowed down the growth of the sector. The year 2021 was that of all records and the trend does not seem to be reversing.