IN danger of being retrenched? Or is your business going under because the bank won't loan you money?

Either way, some French workers are taking extreme measures in business 'negotiations'.

The Sunday Times in London reported that beleaguered employees are resorting to something known as 'bossnapping' to get their way.

Take the employees of Preciturn, a small engineering company, for example.

When they found out that their company may go under because senior executives at UK-based bank RBS refused to give them alone, they stormed the branch and refused to allow the bankers to go home.

After being forced to sleep on the floor for the night, the bankers caved in the next morning and signed a cheque for 149,000 euros ($300,000), which helped to keep Preciturn afloat.

With French workers getting angrier at the state of their country's economy, bossnappings have been happening regularly in recent weeks at companies such as Sony, 3M, Caterpillar and Michelin, where senior executives were held against their will by employees.

Unemployment is rising by 4,000 a day, and the nation's wealth is set to fall by 3.3 per cent this year.

Not budging

Reports of multi-million-euro bonuses and golden parachutes at corporate firms have also fuelled this anger, which eventually drove those like Mr Gerard Sugier, who is part of the Confederation Fran??aise Democratique du Travail union.

When Mr Sugier, a former employee of Preciturn, heard that 135 of his ex-colleagues could lose their jobs because RBS had gone back on an agreement to guarantee Preciturn deals worth 500,000 euros, he led 42 workers to one of the bank's branches in Lyon and got two senior bankers to come down and talk to them.

'We told them that without their guarantee, the business was in trouble - our salaries wouldn't be paid. And we said we weren't leaving until they agreed to a renegotiation,' Mr Sugier said.

He denied that the two bankers were bossnapped, saying that they were free to leave if they wished.

'But since we weren't budging, they didn't dare to leave us in the branch on our own,' he told the Sunday Times.

'We'd organised our own food and we had pizzas, sandwiches, cheese, (sausages) and beer. We asked them to pay for the meal but they refused, so we didn't share it.'

The workers emerged as heroes. Mr Matthieu Burthey, their chief executive, said that they rescued the business.

The success of such bossnappings may eventually prompt other French workers to follow suit.

Employees of a Sony factory in southwest France won a commitment from their employer to add 13million euros to their retrenchment package by holding their chief executive for a night.

And at the 3M office in central France, where 110 jobs are to be cut, workers got another 10 months' redundancy pay by taking the director Luc Rousselet hostage.

Although public opinion is behind the bossnapping workers, experts say that such acts may prove counterproductive.

Mr Guy Groux, a research director at the Centre for Studies of French Political Life, said that employers were 'very afraid for the image of France'.

This article was first published in The New Paper.