The French government has responded to an American tire chief's comments slamming the country's labor system, reports Business Insider.
In a letter to Titan CEO Maurice Taylor, Secretary for Industrial Productivity Reform Arnaud Montebourg blasts Taylor's note as "extremist", "ignorant" and insulting.
"France is proud to welcome on its soil more than 20,000 foreign businesses representing more approximately 2 million employees," he writes.
Each year, we count more than 700 decisions by companies to create jobs and commerce in France. And this strong attractiveness is not weakening — quite the opposite: year after year, it is reinforced.
Montebourg had been negotiating with Taylor's Illinois-based Titan International to avoid having to close a factory in the town of Amiens over rising costs. Titan ended up refusing the terms of the local manufacturing union's contract offer and shut down much of the plant.
Read more of this report including the full reply by Arnaud Montebourg from Business Insider.