Paris - French workers for a British adhesives maker who held their managers hostage were granted twice as much redundancy pay as had been offered before the boss-napping, France Info radio reported Thursday.

The 68 employees at the factory in the south-eastern French town of Bellegarde have will now receive 1.7 million euros (2.27 million dollars) in redundancy payments by the British group Scapa after they held captive four managers who had come to negotiate the shutdown of the site.

According to Christophe Bourget, an official with the CGT trade union, "When you are dealing with people who do not want to negotiate, this is the only means. The strategy pays off, but you have to know when to stop."

The factory is now scheduled to be closed in June. Scapa employs 1,300 people worldwide, 238 of them in France. In December, the company said that sales were down 34 per cent and that it would slash 11 per cent of its payroll.

There have been several incidents of boss-napping in France in recent weeks. A manager who had been held hostage in 2002 told France Info Thursday that the tactic could be considered "a necessary evil."

"It enabled us to unblock the situation and saved us days of negotiations," said the manager, who asked not to be named.