A FELLOW I know arrived at work recently to find that his company had hired someone new, and given the woman his exact job title
writes
Pamela Druckerman in the New York Times (merci au Chien Oiseau de
la Ferme de la Perle).
Soon afterward, he said, higher-ups cut his department’s budget and stopped replying to his emails.
The
man suspects he’s headed for that infamous place in French companies
known as “le placard,” or the closet. Many workers here have permanent
contracts that make it very hard to fire them. So some companies resort
to an illegal strategy: They try to make someone so miserable, he’ll
quit. “What happens next is, I’ll lose my team and my staff, and
therefore I’ll have nothing to do,” the man predicted. “You still have
to come to work every day, but you have no idea why.”
Labor
laws are the main topic of conversation here. The government has
battled unions and other groups for months over a bill that would, among
other things, make it easier to fire people when a company is losing
money. This week, short of votes, it forced the bill through the lower
house by decree (if a measure on Thursday to block this move fails, the
bill will go on to the Senate).
It’s
obvious that the current system isn’t working. The bill’s supporters
argue that business owners are reluctant to hire employees, because it’s
so complicated and expensive to fire them when times are bad. And times
are pretty bad:
France
has 10 percent unemployment, roughly twice the levels in Germany and
Britain. For young people, it’s around 24 percent. President François
Hollande has said he’ll run for re-election next year only if he
succeeds in reducing unemployment.
While
many other European countries have revamped their workplace rules,
France has barely budged. The new labor bill — weakened after long
negotiations — wouldn’t alter the bifurcated system, in which workers
either get a permanent contract called a “contrat à durée indéterminée,”
known as a C.D.I., or a short-term contract that can be renewed only
once or twice. Almost all new jobs have the latter.
And
yet it isn’t just unions that oppose the bill. So do more than 60
percent of the population, who fear the bill would strip workers of
protections without fixing the problem. Young people took to the streets
to oppose it, demanding C.D.I.s, too.
Why are the French so wedded to a failing system?
For
starters, they believe that a job is a basic right — guaranteed in the
preamble to their Constitution — and that making it easier to fire
people is an affront to that. Without a C.D.I., you’re considered naked
before the indifferent forces of capitalism.
At
one demonstration in Paris, young protesters held a banner warning that
they were the “génération précaire.” They were agitating for the right
to grow up. As Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow point out in their
new book, “The Bonjour Effect,” getting a permanent work contract is a
rite of adulthood. Without one, it’s hard to get a mortgage or car loan,
or rent an apartment.
Mainstream
economic arguments can’t compete. “Basic facts of economic science are
completely dismissed,” said Étienne Wasmer, a labor economist at
Sciences Po. “People don’t see that if you let employers take risks,
they’ll hire more people.” Instead, many French people view the
workplace as a zero-sum battle between workers and bosses.
Economic
debates are also framed as political showdowns. It’s hard to separate
opposition to the labor bill from dislike of President Hollande, whose
approval rating has sunk to 14 percent. It doesn’t help that Mr.
Hollande was elected on a skewer-the-rich platform (remember the 75
percent income tax?). By backing the bill, he now appears to be siding
with C.E.O.s.
France’s
rising political star, the economy minister Emmanuel Macron, is a labor
reformer, too, but at least he presents a coherent worldview: He said
France needs young people who want to become billionaires.
Like my friend in the placard, even those lucky enough to have C.D.I.s can struggle at work. In one
study,
workers with C.D.I.s reported more stress than those with short-term
contracts, in part because they felt trapped in their jobs. After all,
where else would they get another permanent contract?
In a forthcoming European Working Conditions Survey, 12 percent of
French respondents said they’d been bullied or harassed at work in the
past month, far more than in any other European country. C.D.I.s alone
don’t cause harassment, but they make it harder to escape.
… No
matter what the government does, the workplace is becoming less secure.
If French taxi drivers are outraged by competition from Uber, what will
they do when self-driving cars arrive? “It is not going to get better,”
warned Jean Tirole, a Frenchman who won the 2014 Nobel in economic
science. “The digital society increases uncertainty about the nature of
jobs, so in the future firms will be even more reluctant to make
permanent job offers.”
I
don’t want to confront capitalism while naked either. But there’s got
to be a middle ground between the streets and the closet.
