All Gall

While it has done much for the economy of France as a whole, the Common Market has been no boon to the French subsidiaries of General Motors and Remington Rand. Hard hit by massive French imports of low-priced Italian refrigerators. G.M.'s Frigidaire plant in France early this month laid off 685 of its 3,100 workers. Last week Remington, which has steadily lost ground in the French market to West German typewriter makers, announced that it planned to dismiss 300 French employees and move all its European portable-typewriter production to a newer plant in The Netherlands.

None of this was likely to cause much hardship. There is a severe labor shortage in most of France just now, and both G.M. and Remington had already lined up new jobs for 80% of the men they were laying off. Nonetheless, news of the firings provoked a storm of resentment; at the G.M. Frigidaire plant, Catholic and Communist unions joined in a protest demonstration. More ominous yet, French Minister of Industry Michel Maurice-Bokanowski hustled to the unions' support, thundering: "In the future, new foreign investment programs, particularly from U.S. firms, must be examined with greatest care." In fact. Bokanowski was unlikely to do anything more than fume: he is one of the most pro-U.S. members of De Gaulle's Cabinet and, in any case, both French law and the reciprocal trade agreement between France and the U.S. bar him from doing much to curtail U.S. investment. But his anger rejected a failure on the part of G.M. and Remington to remember that they were operating in France--not the U.S. To Frenchmen, as to many Europeans, ousting a man from his job is almost as serious as exiling him from his country. What really exercised Bokanowski was that G.M. and Remington had not warned him well in advance that they were contemplating such drastic action--which perhaps would have enabled him to step in with special aid for the firms.

By declining to call on the government for help. G.M. and Remington executives in France had lived up to their principles as free enterprisers. But they had also suffered a setback in public relations.

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