Friday, June 22, 2007
Coming home, and a note on French labor law
I write this post via Blackberry from the airport in Lyon, France. I flew here Wednesday night, had a long day of meetings yesterday followed by an outstanding dinner (steak tartare, if you must know), and now I am flying home. I should land in Newark in the late afternoon, if all goes well.
Over dinner last night I got caught up on Nicholas Sarkozy's various reform proposals, especially as they pertain to the labor markets. The French system produces some outstanding people, especially at the top, but employers undoubtedly hire many fewer workers because the laws governing employment make it extraordinarily difficult to lay people off. In order to protect people from employers who would therefore try to "induce" workers to resign "voluntarily," there is a massive array of rights that make the workplace inflexible. French workers are not too expensive in the abstract, but there is very little fluidity in either the intercompany labor market or the intracompany management of employees hired to do one thing and now asked to do another. Sarko is apparently going to try to reform this a bit, although not so much that France will become an employer's paradise. (Today's papers report that Sarko's government secured a change in the EU constitution eliminating the EU's 50-year-old commitment to "undistorted competition," supposedly "to allay concerns in [France] that the EU has become too 'Anglo-Saxon.'")
In any case, the action is coming soon. French presidents have the most leverage - "legitimacy," as they say here - during the 100 days following their election, the equivalent of the American "honeymoon." Sarkozy has decided to keep the government working through August - quelle horreur - to exploit this period to the fullest. He is also hoping that labor opposition will be muted during the summer months - many French businesses shut during most of August, so the actual impact of anti-government strikes will be minimized, and besides, French workers would prefer to spend that time on the beaches of Juan les Pins. Who wouldn't? We will know by the American Labor Day whether Sarko has won.
I also learned that the French president has some political levers that his American counterpart could not imagine. Apparently the president of France has an annual slush fund of €100 million that is officially at his disposal for any use he might make of it. I was told - could this be correct? - that it does not have to be accounted for and cannot be audited. Cabinet ministers have similar, smaller, "resources" at their disposal. Suffice it to say that this fund makes a lot of things possible. It probably also explains why the French are not particularly sympathetic to American demands that the United Nations, for example, be officially transparent in financial matters.
Finally, I thought it interesting that one of Sarko's reforms is to require that union elections be by secret ballot. I note that the elimination of the secret ballot in union elections is one of the top priorities of our own Democrats. So those of you who think of the Democrats as America's "French" party may end up being quite unfair. To France.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Jun 22, 02:43:00 PM:
I just HATE having my delusions shattered. But then again, France has had this coming for fifty years. It took them 20 years less and hardly any blood (this time around) than the Soviet Union to
get to a a more 'lassaiz faire' approach to labor and government.
Excellent post.
By 
Viking Kaj, at
Fri Jun 22, 09:20:00 PM:
We're busy closing our French office, the GM/controller over there is getting 23 months wages as severance under French law.
From where I'm sitting, Sark has his work cut out for him.
