BRUSSELS, Belgium - April 9, 2009 - Fiat staff in Brussels closeted local managers inside their office for several hours in another apparent "boss-napping" linked to worker anger over job cuts in Europe.

The dispute centered on failed negotiations over 24 planned redundancies at a sales and repair office in the Schaerbeek suburb.

A Reuters witness said the three managers walked free after being holed up in their office throughout the afternoon with a group of workers outside the door.

"Twenty-four of us have been told our jobs will go, without compensation, without pension arrangements," Jean-Pierre Timmermans, a 51-year-old employee in the reception area told Reuters shortly before the managers left.

"All we want is dialogue and we have had no dialogue," said Timmermans, who said he had worked in the company for 28 years.

Earlier, an unidentified man who answered the telephone at the office said personnel were preventing local management from leaving the premises and were in discussions with them.

"A number of the staff are blocking the door. The management can't leave. We are discussing the closure, the situation is calm," he said.

A source at the Italian carmaker's head office in Turin, Italy, earlier said the managers were being held hostage. Later, a Fiat spokesman confirmed the standoff but added, "It's been civil."

Mechanic Roland Flamand said the managers barricaded themselves inside the office after staff from the workshop protested at the collapse of negotiations.

"When you throw out a mechanic after 34 years of service what do you want him to do? I don't know where I am going to start, because I can't be retrained - this is what I have done all my life," said Flamand.

In France, the last boss-napping ended on Wednesday when workers released four managers they held overnight when talks came to a head over the potential closure of an adhesive tape factory run by Britain's Scapa Group in southern France.