At 50 and after a career mostly spent in the world of human resources, Marie-Hélène Morin has just joined the Federation of French selective perfumery (FFPS) [1] as its General Delegate. She succeeds Bernard Tessier who becomes advisor to the President.
This employment law specialist is used to collective bargaining. She began her career in 1984 at CGEE Alsthom which later became Cegelec, then as Head of Social Affairs at Davum Armatures, a subsidiary of Usinor Sacilor (Arcelor Mittal). In 1995 she leaves the industry for service providers to integrate Carglass as its Director of Human Resources and then joins in 1996, still as a HRD, the Minit Group who operates in France through two networks of specialized outlets: Mister Minit (230 points of sales), and Montre Service (55 points of sales). As of 2002, she is also in charge of the social relations of the multi service shoe repair branch and becomes the Vice-President of one of the employers’ organization, the SRIC (Syndicat des Réparateurs Industriels de la Chaussure - Union of Industrial Shoe repairers).
First Priority: complete the cycle of negotiations on the new collective agreement for the selective perfumery. The former agreement was denounced in 2008 by all the employers’ organizations who wanted to distinguish clearly selective distribution from beauty treatments. "The previous agreement in force dated back to 1978 and even included aesthetics schools, but the needs of distribution and the ones of beauty treatments are quite different", explains the new General Delegate.
"At the end of the notice period of three years, the current agreement will expire October 28, 2011, and will therefore no longer be applicable. Our objective is to reach an agreement before the end of 2012", she added. It is a total of nearly 17,000 employees who are directly concerned.
The other major project is training. "This is a key issue. The core of perfume and cosmetic selective distribution depends of advice given, and therefore of the training of sales beauty consultants. Of course big names in the business have their own training centres, but for smaller structures there aren’t really any adapted solutions." The main challenge is to find ways of training employees, without penalizing the activity, especially that of small independent structures.
"A reflection has already started, we will resume it with the aim of finding innovative solutions. At this point, all options are open, including the possibility of creating a academy under the aegis of the FFPS. But nothing has been decided yet, the reflection process is only starting again with also an important social component attached to it", emphasised Morin.
