An engineer's salary of €19,000: Carlos Tavares' fake news

During an interview on the LCI television channel to promote his book, “Un pilote dans la tempête” (A Pilot in the Storm), Carlos Tavares used a far-fetched (and completely false) comparison to demonstrate that the salary level of politicians in France was too low.
  
“The salary of your president?” Carlos Tavares proudly asked David Pujadas. “About €19,000,” he replied. “That's roughly the salary of a good engineer at Stellantis with between five and ten years of experience,” Carlos Tavares continued with the confidence of someone who knows what he's talking about. “You're still well paid when you're an engineer at Stellantis,” remarks the journalist.
This scene did not go unnoticed at Stellantis. In addition to the tone of the book, in which he blames the current difficulties at Stellantis on the teams (without taking any responsibility himself), which had already been poorly received, this promotional tour turned into a disaster.
“These statements are completely false and misleading. The average salary of an engineer at Stellantis with 5 to 10 years of experience is between €4,000 and €6,000 gross per month, including bonuses, according to reliable internal company data,” wrote the CFE-CGC union at Stellantis in a statement released this weekend.

“I rarely criticize Tavares, but this is too much,” said Laurent Oechsel, CFE-CGC Stellantis central union representative. "He turned the group around in 2013 and made the necessary cost cuts, but then he remained stuck in a cycle. I won't name the executives who told me they were afraid to tell him we were having difficulties. He's a former CEO. This is going way too far."
In fact, internal data on salary levels from the union's salary survey that we were able to consult shows that in the two classifications F11 and F12, which cover 68% of executives, the median salaries are €4,600 and €5,400 gross per month respectively (including bonuses and profit-sharing), with average ages for these two categories of 52 and 50 (far from the 5 to 10 years of experience).

Stellantis management did not comment on the statements made by its former executive, but confirmed the actual salary range to us: “Employee representatives are informed of the company's salary scale each year. This shows an average salary of between €67,000 and €71,000 for an engineer with 5 to 10 years of experience.” This translates into a monthly salary of between €5,583 and €5,916. That is less than three times less than what Tavares claims.

“These statements have deeply shocked and outraged employees, engineers and managers alike, who see them as an unacceptable attempt to distort their professional reality and minimize their daily efforts,” the CFE CGC statement said.
There are also Tavares' statements about French people not liking to work, which have gone down badly in a company where employees have been heavily involved in turning the group around. “For several days now, the reaction of the teams on the sites and internal networks has been unanimous: the comments made do not reflect their remuneration conditions or their commitment to the company,” continues the CFE-CGC statement.
In the current context, the union is concerned about the possible consequences of these comments on the social climate within the company and considers it “immature and irresponsible, to say the least, to make such false allegations.” “These comments risk fueling mistrust and further weakening the bond between employees and their company.”

While he denounces the criticism of his salary (which is the subject of a chapter) in his book, Carlos Tavares is well aware that this is a sensitive issue in our country. No stranger to controversy, he may not have been able to resist sparking a new one...