And Jean Pelin is put at the service of the UIC

A turnover by France of 100 billion euros, a trade surplus of more than 10 billion, 230,000 direct jobs and at least two times more jobs induced... "Chemistry is everywhere!" proclaims the Director General of the Union of chemical industries (UIC), John Pelin, recently elected to the Presidency of the Giit, the Group of the European chemical industry employers.

First French to take the reins of this young dedicated to social dialogue instance of elsewhere also one of our compatriots, François Cornélis, who chairs the other great European organisation, Cefic , Jean Pelin is an industrialist in the soul, the secondary in the national GDP decline much concerned about. And that the inflation of the regulation, including European, darkens even more. "The chemical industry has seen to descend on it a huge mass of texts of any kind. Do you know that there are today more than 600 directives or European regulations that apply to the sites or the chemicals!

A habitué of the Thalys

At the UIC, where he worked alongside four Presidents in nine years, Jean Pelin household not sentence to try to stem this tide of rules. Starting with the famous Reach directive, against which he has fought tirelessly, with others, since the end of the 1990s. Cefic is the iron against the European Commission. Affairs at UIC. A sharing of roles does not prevent Jean Pelin to be a regular at the Thalys: on average, the Director General of UIC travels once a week in Brussels.

But the lobbying action a term that he doesn't much like , according to him, must be relative. "It happened to me to read in the press that the chemistry was the most powerful lobby of France." "If it were true, it will be", he sighs. Moreover, the regulatory challenge is that one of five horses in battle of the UIC, the other being the attractiveness of the site France, the social dialogue, the image of the sector and innovation.

This range of angles of attack, which is the essence of any professional organization, is not to displease him. "I think have some capacity for adaptation", considers this multi-skilled of fifty-four years, also a graduate of Stanford.

The first twenty years of his career, in areas and functions could not be more varied, are sufficient to prove it. After to be rubbed in finance in the food industry, General Foods, and the logistics in electronics, with Grundig that it joined at the peak of its glory, Jean Pelin took in 1986, year of his expatriation in Frankfurt as Director General of Econocom Germany, a decisive turn: that of the "service industry". A job that he did not cease to exercise since, either as Director General of the European society of industrial Documentation (ODS) or at the helm of the company of industrial maintenance Game, which was one of the vectors of the diversification of the Cogema in the non-nucléaire before that this strategy was finally abandoned. And Jean Pelin is put at the service of the UIC.