Of many canny quips on the subject, I remember something like, "I like progress, but not the change." Let us hope that with this we can have our cake and eat it too through change. We will know more in five years or so?
4
Get ready for President Le Pen.
10
When you are replaceable, well, it's time to brush up on your skillset.
Tab A in Slot B or burger flipping are jobs anyone can do.
And, if you are complacent in your job and do the bare minimum to get by, well, there's people who appreciate work and a paycheck more than you.
20
9% unemployment rate - for some time.
In America - any elected representatives would pay a heavy price.
I love France and used to speak French at one time - not with folks who read Me Monde but every day folks.
I am planning to spend this summer there.
But I am beginning to think that this could be one of those summers of discontent.
Strikes at most inconvenient times.
No wonder some young French professionals I know want to migrate to America.
Without food on the table for so many - sacre coeur!!
Quelle dommage!
2
Enjoy France this summer; there is lots to see. I know a French couple who are happy to be back in France after three years here, mainly because it is so much safer for their children. Y'know, guns, health care, and stuff. One hopes that hiring will pick up in France so people don't have to chose between jobs and safety.
19
Payroll taxes should also be reformed, I believe they are the highest in Europe.
8
In this country we've used the awful "business cycle" to eliminate dead wood in a company -- the unproductive and the older, useful, overpaid workers by means of periodic layoffs, downsizing or more politely "right-sizing."
But good luck replacing them with young, low-paid millennials.
Many have little or no vocational training and have no work ethic. Unless they are constantly prodded into activity, they spend the workday socializing, listening to music and playing with their phones. Moreover, they feel entitled to do so. My manager asked me to put them to work. After describing their required duties, the chief socializer told me to my face, "We don't take orders from you." It turned out he was mistaken.
When we hired them, the company had recently become profitable. Management got excited and wanted to expand the workforce. But the do-nothing attitude of the new hires slowly spread through the ranks like a cancer. The result of the low productivity is the facility is being closed, with all the workers both old and new forced to find jobs elsewhere.
The parent organization, a French company, took no interest in the labor issues and offered no support for our attempts to clean up the mess. We watched our department fall to pieces until now there is almost nothing left.
Sure, there may have been other causes, but just like an onion, we saw the department rot from the inside and once it started there was no going back.
21
".....new jobs will eventually be created". Where is the evidence for that? Will they be the same type of jobs that have been created in the USA post NAFTA and post China's entrance to the WTO : part-time, low-wage, and few or no benefit jobs ?
17
There are three social models in the capitalist world: the Franco-Italian model, which almost guarantees lifetime employment once one is hired, whether one is still needed or not; the Scandinavian model, which provides government help for those no longer needed by their employers; and the Anglo-American model, which invites the unemployed to seek help at soup kitchens and homeless shelters.
Only one of those systems has consistently led to prosperity, low unemployment, and high levels of social solidarity and cohesion. (Hint: it isn't ours.)
79
Unemployment has soared in France in recent years. Clearly it isn’t their system that has led to the low unemployment you mention.
4
Try again. It wasn't the Franco-Italian model he was talking about, and not the Anglo-American...
20
What a mix in the game of life, no matter where you live.
There are some companies large and small that on balance treat people fairly, provide decent or very good wages and benefits. Some of course pay rotten wages and offer few if any decent benefits.
The number of unionized workers has fallen over the decades, but there still are powerful public unions and a few large private unions that have the clout to get exceptionally high wages and outstanding benefits for members.
Like many others, I've personally seen some of them also abuse their power in unbelievable ways, but often it amounts to forcing a company to keep utterly incompetent or unnecessary people as there is no sane way to get rid of them.
Both labor and capital of course can and do abuse their power, just depends on whose holding the most power at a given time and in a given industry.
It would be nice to see honest, reasonable people lead both segments, with an actual eye to try to find an honest, decent middle ground. Doesn't seem it will ever happen, whether here in the US or in France or wherever. Sad.
But I guess we have to keep trying to help businesses as well as workers, but what a hard job it is. Imbalance at some point seems to always develop, with the most pain usually felt by little people of course. Wish the French the best as they try to re-balance the social and economic structures once again.
16
They got what they voted for.
7
We had no choice really, the alternative being Marine Le Pen. By all accounts—the opposition at large and the dissidence in her own party that split over it after the election as Florian Philippot, her main adviser, created Les Patriotes party—an incompetent and unknowledgeable candidate.
14
Next thing you know, they'll be trying to do this here in the UK. Maybe, in certain respects, we would be better off leaving the EU and this is coming from a person who voted remain. If they have another referendum on it, I'm definitely voting leave. The decline of the EU and the countries that are a part of it is so obvious.
8
Do you think there is any power in the UK to withstand the forces that brought about this in France? Is the EU as a body responsible for Macron and his pro-capital policies?
No on both counts.
Good luck with that Brexit strategy to avoid what capital would bring about anyway, layoffs and no job training.
You conflate Macron 's neoliberalism with the EU here.
6
Hopefully you're being sarcastic? UK businesses already have much more leeway to fire employees than French business (in other words, it's actually an option).
From what I heard talking to a French programmer, they have excessive holidays/leave and very little pressure. This sounds like an employee's paradise, but comes with lower pay as well as higher likelihood of needing to work as contractor before hiring.
Having worked in the US, the UK work environment is already unnervingly low pressure, I can't imagine the French one with even shorter hours and less workdays.
Also having worked in the US, it seems reasonable to me for employers to be able to fire people based on their performance. I've seen government employees, a much harder to fire category of employees, who were horrible at their job and never fired. They simply brought down the productivity of the group as a whole and mismanaged their projects.
It seems like France is trying to find that balance of being fair to both the employees and employers. That's a laudable task and hardly an indication of Europe's decline.
16
They _are_ doing it here in the UK ...
1
Did I miss the part of benefits the French worker receives. It is extrememly socialistic, and so don't try to pull me into thinking the average person needs help to keep their job. A French lady worked with me in Calif under temporary assignment from our facility in France. She told me the number of weeks they get off, holidays, state laws, vacation, etc. I was aghast that eight weeks a year was normal. Who do you think is going to pay for that opulence.
26
The normal vacation allotted by law is 5 weeks. It’s not an opulent society one that cares about the well being of its people. And where do you think the funds are coming from? We, the workers, are paying for it. What your lady friend might not have explained is that more than half of the monthly cost of an employee to an employer goes directly to different kinds of tax, retirement, welfare benefits.
38
Opulence? What you don't get, is that there's a deep philosophical rift between the US and France, with regards to the meaning of Life, and the importance work must hold in it. I hear all the time that we're a Leisure society. But what time do you actually have for leisure if you have at best 2 weeks off/year? You might be fooled by the impression that owning an iphone and spending time on facebook or instagram an hour a day is the height of "leisure", but you're still slaving at a job, and articulating your whole life around it, from when to take your two-week vacation to when you can actually have the week end off to visit family or friends (depending on the workload at the office, of course). You may look at work as a necessary evil (to afford to live), or as a purpose in life (your personal life being but a distraction). Most people seem to accept the second proposition. The French way, until now, gave higher priority in life to personal pursuit of happiness, rather than being a mere cog in a machine owned by, ...well, somebody else. What Macron is doing, is destroying the foundation on which was built the concept that Life could/should have other purposes than simply working just to survive.
53
Workers in the US—it is like so sort of Stockholm syndrome. Rather than look at good benefits and think, gee, that looks good, and then work to improve our conditions, we want to tear everything down to us, or worse. We don’t offer a hand to anyone else, we step in their neck. What happened?
26
Funny how inequality In the U.S. tops the charts, but the commentators here see fit to lecture France for being too generous to workers.
Just think, if only France would listen to us, French child poverty rates might be nearly as high as ours in a few years.... We might even get rid of their health care system, so that, like us they're one broken bone or hospitalization away from utter destitution....
116
Well said! We want to keep our welfare system precisely because it helps protect the weak, like kids, sick people or the elderly.
27
That struck me as well. Everyone is up in arms about the supposed wage gap, but what a nerve for insisting workers shouldn't be thrown on the sidewalk with a day's notice when a cheaper worker applies for your job.
18
Unions in France have outlived their usefulness a few decades ago. By far, their worst problem came from the inability of companies to fire incompetent workers, thus discouraging small and big entrepreneurs from opening shops on their soil.
20
It's always the worker's fault. Never the employer whom hired them in the first place. This goes doubly for hiring illegals to save a buck.
15
Pikettey (of Capital in the 20th Century Fame) observed that Macron and Trump, although radically different personalities, are pursuing exactly the same economic policies (Trump, Macron: même combat 12 décembre 2017) relative to the global economy.
"Trump, like Macron, has just had very similar tax reforms adopted. In both cases, these constitute an incredible flight in the direction of fiscal dumping in favour of the richest and most mobile."
If you a cynic, you may conclude that Macron is Trump, but with the vocabulary of ÉNA and the polish of Rothchild banker.
But the truth is that globalization has winners (chiefly the mobile elite) and losers, mainly the Western Middle Class (to this day denied by Paul Krugman) More and more competing with people on the other end of the planet better trained and able to perform the same job for less, this category has seen its income stagnate and their jobs move to low wage countries.
The political consequences, seen in the US in the election of Trump, will still have to be seen in France.
For more see:
http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/12/12/trump-macron-meme-combat/
and
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/12/15/la-democratie-sapee-par-l...
33
Excellent post. Macron and the cabal of professional pols who jumped aboard his life raft presidential bid as the last-ditch hope to save their rightist careers (Gerard Colomb, PS? Yeah, and Joe Lieberman was a Democrat...) in the looming implosion of traditional parties now again use the same tired scam we've seen since Blair copied Clinton and Schroeder copied Blair: enter from a door on the political left to better sell business-tailored reforms of the right, all the while promising progressive social counter-proposals to make it all sound centrist. Macron is not just a Davos man; he's a Davos president seeking to impose a Davos world. Pity the 99.9999%.
8
France needs reform of its labor laws badly. Unions workers make up about 10% of the work force but have grown too powerful. They must strike a balance not to tip the scales the other way. I like what I see so far. There is very little foreign investment in France which they desperately need as expensive regulations and high labor cost discourage investment, both foreign and domestic.
Also, the high unemployment, especially for young people, has been going on for decades. a very high percentage of the unemployed are Arabic, or Arabic descent. When the French brought Algerians and Moroccans in during the 60s
they never gave them the support they needed to succeed. The result is there are a few million disenfranchised, unemployed people that has also been the breeding ground for radical islamists groups. I love France but they have a plethora of social problems as well as economic. I am hoping Macron can address some of them.
41
France has no choice but to reform. It may be painful in the beginning but France has basically regulated itself into box making it nearly impossible to do business outside of the country. We live in an ever growing global economy and the current labor laws virtually lock France out of the market place especially in certain industries.
28
"making it nearly impossible to do business outside of the country."
Another utterly incorrect cliche. But then you probably think there is no French word for entrepreneur! Here is a small bit of the reality:
"France has 39 of the world’s biggest 500 companies, more than Germany or the UK. France has one of the world’s most diversified and sophisticated economies, from large industrial companies, telecommunication, finance, agriculture, luxury goods, fashion, film and entertainment. It is also the world’s second largest outward investor ($220 billion) behind the USA but ahead of the UK, Germany and Japan."
Take a guess as to who is building the UK's Hinkley C nuclear power station (and several in China), or is the major contractor on London CrossRail and their HighSpeed 2, and California's High Speed train? Airbus sold more planes in the past 12 months than Boeing. Carrefour is one of the world's largest hypermarket chains in the world, including being the biggest foreign presence in China until recently.
23