Today's French Workers Think the Company Owes Them Everything...

An interview with the head of CE Consultants, a French head-hunting company, caught my attention, and not just for what the Le Figaro article teaches about today's French attitudes to the working environment.

Catherine Euvrard: Before, work was the center of our preoccupations. You did our utmost for your company and, when that didn't satisfy you anymore, you resigned. Today, the vast majority of wage-earners furnish the least possible efforts. They think the company owes them everything and that their only obligation is to fulfill the number of hours in their contract. … We are in a decadent country. …

To what do you attribute this phenomenon of disinvestment from one's job?

To the negative images one gives of work and the company. For the past 20 years, the French have been taught that one can earn money without working. The media value individuals who succeed without doing anything (notably through television's reality shows). Also, they touch on company heads only to denonce the financial scandals in which some of them are involved. To such an extent that the word "boss" has become tarnished.

…In addition, those who have climbed from the lowest rungs of the ladder often have more audacity then others. Unfortunately, today, the weight of diplomas remains extremely strong. Bosses still seek executives from the grandes écoles, because endogamy reassures them. And yet, what French companies need today, on the contrary, is to take risks!

This article about a collection of individuals and the national culture that encompasses them got me to thinking about nations on the international scene, notably France's (or old Europe's) relationship with the United States.

Isn't it quite similar? Besides making speeches, the French want to furnish the least possible efforts, and they feel that their country is entitled to have its views not only heard, but have them predominate. As for that upstart across the Atlantic, it is supposed to owe everything to the France of old and follow the precepts of age-old wisdom. In addition, the French think that one can earn peaceful relations with one's neighbors without working (at it); provide some understanding to dictators, to terrorists, to criminals, and everything will be well.

Meanwhile, who are the French media busy denouncing? The world's preeminent "boss", n'est-ce pas? And the world's hardest workers. (Think only of Canal +'s mocking United States as "the World Company".) Always looking for the darkest way to present anything American, always invoking the worst scandal in the field, always likening Washington's every move (or failure to move) to a deed of shame…