For the third consecutive year, Frogsmoke launches the annual parade of French garçons and filles who strip for a nude calendar. Yesterday the season was officially opened with the tenth edition of the Dieux du Stade calendar. Today we have the near-unemployed workers of a heating factory.

Workers at a struggling heater factory in northwest France are taking it all off in a bid to save their jobs: They posed nude for a calendar to call attention to their plight.

Mr. February is wearing nothing but a cardboard box. Mr. October is posed like the famed Rodin sculpture “The Thinker.” Mr. April is naked but for a flag bearing the company’s logo, flowing in front of his lower body.

Their protest is the latest, and barest, effort by French workers to fight back at the economic downturn. After receiving the news in June that they might be laid off, the workers at the Chaffoteaux factory took a creative approach to show their displeasure. Fifteen men who work at the factory in Ploufragan, 450 kilometers (280 miles) west of Paris, posed for the calendar. Five thousand copies were printed, and 2,000 had been sold at euro 7 each as of Monday, three days after they were made available.

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Last year there were at least fifteen calendars with French sans clothes. Let’s see what 2010 brings!