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  • Have a Better Idea?

    Metropoleparis, France
    June 7 2005

    Have a Better Idea?


    Paris:- Monday, 6. June 2005:- In case politicians in France didn't
    get the message of the 'non' vote for the European Constitution last
    week, rail unions went ahead with nationwide strike on Thursday, the
    day after Dutch voters gave the treaty a resounding vote of no
    confidence.

    Totally undeterred, politicians in France scrambled to boost Humpty-
    Dumpy back up on his wall. Président Jacques Chirac sadly let his
    faithful prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin go, and vastly relieved,
    go he did, all the way to a well-deserved holiday in the sun on
    Crete.

    Those of us left behind have been treated to the heady spectacle of
    the formation of a new government. Out with some 'old' dudes who
    weren't all that exciting and in with some 'new,' who aren't all that
    unknown. Curious, I had the impression that these people just lost an
    election.

    Perhaps it's another example of how good the French are at rolling
    with the punches. The centre-left and the centre-right's plot for our
    future has just gotten a solid 'non' and the next day we have the
    same game with pretty much the same players - we got the losers back.
    We, the French, the Dutch, the winners, get nothing. It's like the
    referendum never happened.

    Police waiting for the rollers to form up on Friday.
    It was certainly foreseeable. Nobody who was campaigning for a 'non'
    vote was proposing some kind of alternative, some other way to manage
    this 998 kilo gorilla called Europe. We wake up the day after voting
    and like the politicians here, it's still there, untidy, complicated,
    obscure. Like the Rock of Gibraltar, it isn't going away.

    I guess it's okay. It's June and the summer holidays start soon. It's
    been a rough year. We'll be back in September, refreshed, and we can
    deal with this then.

    Get a Job!
    Things have been pretty busy during the week at the Elysée Palace,
    the headquarters of Jacques Chirac. Before Monsieur Raffarin was
    permitted to depart the new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin,
    was engaged in shuttle diplomacy - no, he was hatching, along with
    the president, a new government. At one point radio news said that
    there would be two prime ministers - a true French 'first' - with
    Monsieur de Villepin sharing the chore with Nicolas Sarkozy.

    The very thought of it brought a ray of sunshine to a dismal week.
    Imagine - the man who the president said had to decide whether to be
    a super- minister of Finance or leader of the president's political
    party, now comes back to the government as the number-two minister of
    the interior, while remaining as the party head.

    Number one - or is it a question of 'number-one-bis?' will be
    ex-foreign minister, ex-minister of the interior, the poetry-writing
    ex-bête noir of the Bush regime, a man who has not been elected - as
    semi-boss of a man who has, who may also be a semi-boss. See what I
    mean? This should be a good show, especially since these two are the
    opposite of being great pals.

    The lesson of the referendum's defeat is supposed to hinge on the
    horrible level of unemployment with the new prime minister being
    committed to turning it around. The official figure is 10.2 percent,
    which translates into 2.48 million French workers seeking jobs. When
    Jacques Chirac took office in 1995 the official rate was 11.5
    percent. It went up a bit then dipped, and now it's rising again. The
    last time the rate was below three percent was in 1974, 31 years ago.

    So it goes without saying that 'reform' is a goal that could benefit
    a lot of people. The problem is all our past experience with these
    'reforms.' There has been early retirement, training for the
    unemployed, creation of public jobs, aid for hiring, reduced social
    charges, reduction of the work week to 39 hours, then 35 hours,
    easing of layoffs, more reductions of social charges, aid for
    apprenticeships - in all, 24 projects to ease unemployment - proposed
    equally by conservative and socialist governments.

    The improbable duo.
    The French are all for 'reform.' Over the past 30 years they have
    lived through a lot of employment 'reforms' and they still find that
    a couple of million workers are without jobs. 'Reform' is starting to
    sound like something politicians should try on themselves. Small
    wonder that nobody minds saluting 'reform' if it's at the top of a
    flag-pole, just as long as there is a promise of protection from it.

    Some issue has been made of the disconnect between what the French
    want and what 'reality' demands. The problem with this is that it is
    not the French who are defining 'reality,' but spokesmen for our
    globalized planet.

    These include east coast Liberals who think the French want to stop
    the world and get off. Folks who write opinion columns for newspapers
    in New York are hardly in a position to judge the effect of dumping
    cheap t-shirts made in China on textile workers in Lille or Lyon. Is
    it 'reality' that demands that factories close in France so they can
    be set up in Armenia? No Armenians will be shopping at any
    supermarkets in France, so should the supermarkets be moved east too?

    It's all very fine to characterize France as having an aging and
    inflexible work force. Ask the pundits how willing they are to jump
    at a chance to write their columns in Bombay for peanuts. Better yet,
    ask their publisher. According to theory, opinion columns outsourced
    to Bangalore will be better because Indians work harder, and they can
    do anything, like 'design your next Airbus or Cadillac.'

    Then there's the innovative Indian game company, that will narrow the
    wage gap, eventually. But first they are hiring. Last year they got a
    million applications and turned 990,000 of them down. The French
    already know all about this.

    Most people in France, if they ever get a job, are going to have to
    be content with the minimum wage. This kind of idea is a red flag to
    conservatives - and liberals! - but the actual figure is seldom
    mentioned. In France, in 2004, the minimum wage, the SMIC, was 1,296
    for 189 hours of work. The hourly SMIC is 7.81, gross. When Jacques
    Chirac became president it was 5.64.

    And they're off! The Friday night roller rando!
    The officially-defined poverty rate for a couple with two kids under
    14 was 1264 in 2001. Why the poverty rate lags a couple of years
    behind in the official statistics is a mystery. Depending on whether
    it's a French or EU calculation, poverty affects between 6.1 and 12.4
    percent of French residents. While the risk of poverty for French
    over 65 is high, it is 25 percent for UK residents.

    The other day Britain gained the right to opt-out of an EU rule
    imposing a maximum work week of 48 hours. The government considers
    this as reflecting popular opinion in favor of 'flexible labour
    markets and freedom of choice.' This opt-out rule was to be phased
    out in 2012 for workers, but countries were expected as ask for
    extensions.

    A British labor spokesmen said that Britain already has the longest
    working hours in Europe. Meanwhile other British companies are
    considering raising the age of retirement from 70 to 75. The way the
    law will probably be written, an employee will be able to request
    staying on, but an employer will be able to refuse.

    According to an editorial in The Times, it is crucial to get older
    workers away from collecting incapacity benefits and back into
    contributing to pension schemes and, in fact, they probably could
    contribute more because of reduced commitments. The Times then cites
    older workers such as millionaires Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan.

    With advice like this from friends on both sides of the Atlantic it
    is hard to see how France can go wrong. However The Times 'cruelly
    described' the planned meeting this weekend between Jacques Chirac
    and Gerhard Schröder as 'lame duck meets dead duck.'

    It looks like Gerhard is going to have to face the CDU's Angela
    Merkel at the ballot boxes, probably in September, but Jacques is
    safe from voters until 2007 even if he is not quite safe from Nicolas
    Sarkozy.

    When it comes right down to it, after 30 years of sluggish growth and
    excessive unemployment, who are we to call these two leaders names?
    The Times, on its pitiful and damp offshore island, can call them
    what it wants. Everything in the UK is alright, Jack! Everything is
    even better in America, according to Monsieur Sarkozy.

    Meanwhile in France the new government team met with representatives
    from labor and the bosses to try and cook up a quick deal today.
    Since union proposals probably take more than a tiny sound-bite,
    TV-news merely said that the bosses suggested 'reforming' labor laws
    to make it easier to lay off workers - as a way of easing
    unemployment.

    Better Ideas, from Europeans?
    It's not easy thinking up something new even if there are plenty of
    examples of what seems to be poor choices. Europe is a crowded and
    old continent that has invented and tried out every form of social
    organization, and is currently stuck with some of yesterday's
    solutions.

    During the recent referendum voters were given a vague choice, of
    voting 'yes' for some unknown and possibly faintly 'liberal'
    conglomo, or voting 'no' and keeping the same old shoddy system that
    is showing its increasing age and fatigue.

    Unlike a billion Chinese, Europeans were given a choice, and they
    selected 'not this one' rather than some unknown leap into
    wheeler-dealer no-holds-bared crypto-capitalism where the bottom line
    is the target and all should be happy to work 62 hours a week just
    for a foothold on it.

    Europeans had that already. After World War II the place was wrecked
    so everybody pitched in to rebuild it. By the 1970s Europeans were in
    a position to produce surpluses and get an extra week's annual
    holidays. But that was the high point of expansion, and stagnation
    has been the rule since then.

    All the same new bridges get built and big new ships are launched,
    rockets loft satellites into space, TGVs run fast and on time, and
    the newly repaved roads are full up with new cars. Europe can even
    afford to clean its dirty old monuments, to make them attractive to
    visitors who throw a lot of loose cash around.

    France's brave adventure with the 35-hour week hasn't been quite as
    negative as the employers federation would have Wall Street believe.
    People with time off spend money where and when they couldn't before,
    and they require extra services, which in turn creates new
    employment. Reverse this idea - like suppress a holiday! - and see
    how many get thrown out of work and how much grayer life becomes.

    Brits and Americans may believe that 'work is good for you,'
    especially if you do a lot of it, but Europeans think that play is
    important. I suppose the disagreement is about proportions. If it's
    possible to make a surplus enough to afford to be idle, why work like
    a galley-slave?

    Is it because the funky western world has decided that we will all be
    happier if we are paid no more than galley-slaves? How could our
    self-interest endorse this? Are beggar's wages the only option
    leading to full employment?

    Look around you. If you are working as hard now as you were in the
    1970s, where has the surplus gone? If you are not getting it and all
    the extra people who have joined the workforce are not getting it,
    where is it going?

    Do you think it's going up the smokestack of health care? Hardly,
    because this employs a lot more than it used to. Maybe it's being
    wasted on social charges. No, probably not - poor people don't put
    welfare money into stock schemes. Okay, maybe the farmers are
    subsidized too much? What do they get for those tomatoes anyway?

    Mounted police pass the club's café every week.
    If you look around you'll probably notice that a lot of people
    starting out in work today are lucky if they earn the minimum wage.
    Thirty years ago you probably made more and had that little surplus
    to spread around, but now most folks are just scraping by.

    Meanwhile everything is supposed to get cheaper. Granted, this
    happens, but it is better or worse? Except for the rich and toys made
    for them, what isn't shoddier today? Take jeans. Lucky that they've
    become chic, so that society hotties can pay 400 for a pair. They
    don't know that better jeans used to be available for $5 everywhere,
    before China got into the 'designer' act.

    http://www.metropoleparis.com/023bistr.html
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