Economist in trouble over French laziness book
Wed 28 July, 2004 13:03

PARIS (Reuters) - An Electricite de France economist is in trouble with her employer after writing a tongue-in-cheek book about laziness in the French workplace.

An EDF spokeswoman said Corrine Maier, author of "Bonjour Paresse" (Hello Laziness), would face a disciplinary hearing at EDF on August 17, but declined to give more details.

A source close to the issue said EDF accused Maier of not respecting company rules and sowing discontent among her colleagues by using pejorative descriptions in her book for low-ranking staff in companies.

The book gives examples of how to take advantage of the system by doing as little work as possible and describes how the most ineffective people are promoted to senior jobs where they can do the least damage.

Maier was not immediately available for comment.

Labour unions at the state-owned behemoth, who have mounted strikes against government plans to partially privatise EDF, are protesting against the disciplinary action, saying Maier did not reveal any secrets, jeopardise business or mention EDF by name.

Anyway French civil servants would go on strike and demonstrate just because they have to get up to go to work every morning :lol:

At EDF, ther are too many people in the offices and not enough on the ground.
It is the same for SNCF, La Poste, France Telecom...

There are 3000 people employed just in the joint production committee (comité d'entreprise) of EDF.
Comme dirait l'autre "Il est temps de dégraisser la mamouth".

What's the mysterious force that keeps this insane system from collapsing ?

My mother works at EDF and according to her, this is true. There's a lot of people who don't do anything, or just that we call "Mimimun Syndical". It sometimes happens she does in two days the work that some people do in one week, but this is Marseille after all, I don't know if that's the same everywhere. When we were in Paris, she worked a lot, but like everyone. Now it's slightly different :D

People are (far) less workaholic in the south of France* ;) I can tell for I have just moved from Paris to Provence.

*on the whole

What's the mysterious force that keeps this insane system from collapsing ?
Intelligence, perception, innovation. People can work really hard and achieve nothing. People who take a break, work much better after the break.
We remain humans, no matter what economists want us to do. One would be really bête to work all day. I envy you, I can't stroll down my street, order a glass of white wine and a salade niçoise. Vive la paresse! Aux barricades contre le nouvel esclavage! ;)

People are (far) less workaholic in the south of France* *on the whole

That's thru only with the "work" in front of alcoolic !!!
As the lated Coluche said: "soit feignant, soit feignant, tu vivra longtemps..."

Is the 35-hour work-week heading for a permanent vacation?

By CHARLES P. WALLACE | BERLIN

Sunday, Jul. 25, 2004
This time of year, work is the last thing on the minds of most Europeans. The E.U. mandates a minimum of four weeks holiday, guaranteeing a traditional summer exodus to beaches and mountains. When France adopted the 35-hour workweek in 2000, many employers met the requirement by simply adding to their employees' annual holiday allowances. It's not uncommon to find French workers with enough time to take both July and August off from work — paid, of course.

Yet just as summer holidays come into full swing, the 35-hour week itself looks like it might get a permanent vacation. Back in 2000, France's Socialist government promised shorter weeks would create jobs. Working fewer hours, it argued, would require more workers to complete a task. Using that noble yardstick, the measure hasn't performed especially well: France's unemployment rate today is 9.8%, compared to 9.6% when the law came into force. Employers and some politicians have been attacking the measure for years, but now the 35-hour week may have met its match. More and more employers in France, Germany and the Netherlands are giving their workers a stark choice: agree to longer hours or wave goodbye to your job as it migrates to another country.

Last week, an overwhelming majority of the 820 employees of auto-parts maker Robert Bosch who work at a Bosch factory near Lyons voted to give up their 35-hour week in return for a guarantee that their jobs would not be moved to Eastern Europe. "Everyone had come to accept the fatality of it — either they approved it or they lost their jobs," says Serge Truscello, a Bosch employee and union leader at the plant.(...)

Plenty of Europeans already pull long hours. More than 10 million German employees put in more than 40 hours a week, according to the government. But for the past 30 years, the average European workweek has been shrinking, and falling behind its American and Asian rivals. According to Paul Swaim, an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (o.e.c.d.) in Paris, since 1970 average working hours have declined 23% in France and 17% in Germany, while rising 20% in the United States and Canada. According to a recent o.e.c.d. labor market study, workers in France averaged 1,453 hours per year while German workers averaged 1,446. But workers in Britain averaged 1,673 hours per year and U.S. workers averaged 1,792 hours.

As supporters of the 35-hour week are quick to point out, there's nothing intrinsically virtuous about working more hours. French workers may log fewer hours than their British counterparts, but the French are more productive; Czechs put in more hours than any other European workers, and yet they're among Europe's least productive. And while French unions and employers bitterly disagree about the job impact of the official 35-hour week, there's some evidence to suggest that at least the law hasn't harmed employment levels; there are an estimated 24.1 million jobs today vs. 23.1 million in 2000. "The most complete and objective studies I've seen indicate that around 50,000 new, durable jobs were created by the 35-hour week," says Marc Touati, chief economist for Natexis Banques Populaire.

Yet there's no question that the May accession of 10 new countries with wages well below the E.U. average has accelerated the attack on the 35-hour week. Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of Medef, France's employers' association, said the 35-hour week "is not just a slippery slope, it's a toboggan toward economic decline."(...)

Does the Bosch move mean France's 35-hour week is dead? Technically, no. The concession Bosch squeezed out of its workers falls within guidelines hammered out last year by the government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin that allow for unions and companies to reach their own agreements. And for now, President Jacques Chirac says he favors "more negotiated flexibility" for the workweek, but opposes changing the 35-hour law. (His Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has gone further, calling the law "perverse" and arguing it should be changed for "those who want to work more in order to earn more.")
(...)

From the Aug. 02, 2004 issue of TIME Europe magazine

Whole article here (http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901040802-672584,00.html).

There are 3000 people employed just in the joint production committee (comité d'entreprise) of EDF.
Comme dirait l'autre "Il est temps de dégraisser la mamouth".

Try and meet the CGT militia

I did a 1 month training period at SNCF last year (reparing TGV) and it was quiter than hollydays :)
8 AM : beggining of the day
8.30 AM : coffee break :)

Try and meet the CGT militia


La CGT, c'est une des maladies de la France.

Avec l'expérience, je trouve que FO est largement pire....

From the NY Times...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Western European productivity growth outpaced that of the United States in the last 30 years: gross domestic product per hour in the European Union is less than 10 percent below G.D.P. in America today; in 1970 the gap was closer to 35 percent, said the European Union's Ameco database. In some countries, including France, productivity now exceeds that in the United States.

But if Europeans are still poorer than Americans, it is because fewer of them hold a job, and those who do have gradually reduced the time they spend at work. Americans have been much more hesitant to work fewer hours, keeping the tally virtually unchanged over the last 10 years despite strong growth.

"You have to ask yourself who really is the odd one out,'' Mr. Daly said. "Leisure is a normal good, and as you become richer, economic theory says that you consume more of it.''

Polls show that Europeans are by and large happy to pay high taxes in return for social services, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the concept of well being in Europe is less linked to material wealth than it is in the United States.

"Americans move from the 20,000 -square-feet house to the 30,000-square-feet house to the 40,000-square-feet house. It's a different mentality,'' said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Enjoying coffee at a brasserie in Paris, Thomas Levassor, 28, said he worked in Silicon Valley as a software engineer for three years, but returned to France to have a family.

"There is a window of maybe five years where the American lifestyle is great - when you're young and healthy and ambitious and single,'' he said. "After that, other things become more important, like culture and family, and then you're much better off in France.''

Giuseppe Roma, who conducts society studies at Censis in Rome, says European shoppers are increasingly rejecting status-quo purchases to buy quality-of-life products.

The new attitude, he says is: "I care about the real quality of life. I may not buy Prada, but I will buy organic olive oil.''

i have a strange feeling : why do i always heard "France, Paris" when Americans talk about Europe ? Seems like France and Paris are the European representation for the usa common way of think !

Never heard about spain, germany,... When they talk about European way of life, politics... THE STILL CHOOSE FRANCE TO GET COMPARATIVE AND EXEMPLES.

Do someone know why ?

That's right: for US citizens, "Western Europe" means France or Germany. UK is half european, half american and other countries only exists for US minorities (Italians, Irish...)

Pour avoir travaillé avec des Américains, je pense que leur système est trop lourd pour être efficace: il n'encourage pas l'initiative mais fait la part belle aux procéduriers. Moralité: pour être bien payé, il faut être son propre patron et surtout trouver des clients.

Labor and leisure

Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley IHT

Americans are materialists, Europeans civilized; Americans hardworking, Europeans lazy. Old stereotypes die hard on both sides of the Atlantic, and now they have taken on a new dimension: work time. Last week the International Monetary Fund made headlines by calling on Europeans to work more as a way to combat high unemployment, low job growth and comparatively low income levels. (...)

Meanwhile, a recent report in this newspaper showed that Europeans continue to pride themselves on being less materialistic and more focused on family and community than their American counterparts ("Continent guards its right to leisure," July 19).

There is, of course, an element of truth in these stereotypes, but as descriptions of two supposedly different cultures, they are far too simplistic.

Take the percentage of the workforce employed, for example. Widely cited by American commentators as evidence for the excesses of the welfare state, the data are in fact much more ambiguous. An important reason a higher percentage of Americans seem to be in the labor force is that so many are not counted - they are in prison or have disappeared from the statistics, which seem increasingly designed to minimize unemployment rates. Nor are all Americans workaholics; 18 percent work part-time, most of them voluntarily.

Some Americans, particularly highly educated, highly paid professionals, do work extraordinarily long hours. But there isn't much evidence that these long hours are a matter of individual choice or of different cultural values. On the contrary, most Americans complain about their stressful daily schedules and their inability to balance work with other activities. Our research shows that most Americans say they would like to work less.

Why, then, the long hours? Americans are compelled to work as long as they do in part because of the pervasive insecurity of American life. (...)

In addition, employers have both the motivation and the ability to encourage or require long hours of their employees. (...)

Fearing that their jobs are in jeopardy, and believing - often correctly - that the only way to achieve economic security is to move up the ladder as fast as possible, Americans find themselves competing with one another to work as much as they can. The American case, then, illustrates not a superior work ethic but a kind of forced overtime unwanted by most.

Fortunately, there are some signs that things may be changing. As we reported in our recent book on technical professionals, "Putting Work in its Place," the entry of large numbers of women into the American labor force has begun to call into question the inevitability of inflexible, "greedy" work schedules. We met a significant number of people who had chosen to work part-time. We say part-time, but in many cases these were people simply seeking to work schedules that Europeans have increasingly come to see as the norm. (...)

In the American context, it is largely middle-class married women who have been able to challenge the culture of long hours. They are economically able to reduce their incomes and benefits because of their spouses' employment. Women also have a generally accepted reason for working less: Americans still view motherhood as a legitimate "excuse" for limiting paid work. The danger, then, is real that challenges to long hours of work will be seen as "proof" that women are different, less committed, inferior workers

There are also reasons to believe that this trap may be avoided, however. Big institutional forces with significant corporate support (...) have been actively promoting workplace flexibility. (...)

American society is changing too. Increasing numbers of men say they would like to spend more time with their children. As the workforce ages, more people are seeking jobs that allow them partially to retire. And, perhaps most important, increased job and career mobility is decreasing the rewards available to those who work long hours, like promotions, and increasing the number of occasions on which one is forced to rethink one's attitude toward employment. It is thus quite possible that the "overworked American" may yield to a more complex, variable pattern of work schedules.

The lesson to be learned from comparing work cultures is not that Europeans should become more like Americans, nor that Americans inhabit a different, more materialistic culture. It is that Europeans have gained politically and socially what many Americans say they want individually but have been unable to achieve politically. Americans, too, would like to have employment security, more flexibility, more leisure, fewer worries about health care and pensions, but the United States still has a long way to go.

Peter Meiksins and Peter Whalley, authors of "Putting Work In Its Place: A Quiet Revolution," are professors of sociology at Cleveland State University and Loyola University, Chicago

dont work hard, work smart.

PARIS Finally, instead of dissembling behind ambiguous notions of Gallic joie de vivre, someone in this leisurely land has declared outright that the French should eschew the Anglo-Saxon work ethic and openly embrace sloth.
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Corinne Maier, the author of "Bonjour Paresse," a sort of slacker manifesto whose title translates as "Hello Laziness," has become a countercultural heroine almost overnight by encouraging the country's workers to adopt her strategy of "active disengagement" - calculated loafing - to escape the horrors of uninterested endeavor.
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"Imitate me, midlevel executives, white-collar workers, neo-slaves, the damned of the tertiary sector," Maier says in her slim volume, which is quickly becoming a national best seller.
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She argues that France's ossified corporate culture no longer offers rank-and-file employees the prospect of success, so, "why not spread gangrene through the system from inside?"
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The book is a counterpoint to efforts by the country's center-right government to repair the damage done to French work habits by decades of Socialist administration, which enacted a 35-hour workweek. It is gaining in popularity just as the International Monetary Fund is urging Europeans to work longer and harder to stiffen their soft economies.
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The French already work less than people in most other developed countries - on average, nearly 300 fewer hours a year than Americans, according to one study.
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In many ways, Maier is typical of France's intelligentsia - overeducated and underemployed. She studied economics and international relations at the National Foundation of Political Sciences, or Sciences-Po, before obtaining a doctorate in psychoanalysis.
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But she works just 20 hours a week writing dry economic reports at the state electric utility, Électricité de France, for which she is paid about $2,000 a month. But sitting in the living room of her Left Bank apartment, equipped with massive stereo speakers, colorful abstract art and a bicycle, Maier, 40, insists that her polemic, though tongue in cheek, has a principled point.
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"Can we work in a corporation and contest the system," she asks, "or must we be blind and docile and adhere to everything that the corporation says?"
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Part of the problem, according to Maier, is that French companies are frozen by strict social norms.
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"Everything depends on what school you went to and what diploma you have," she said, arguing that advancement is slow and comes less from ambition than endurance. "French corporations," she says, "are not meritocracies."
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Workers remain at their jobs until retirement, which stymies the promotion of those below them, she argues, yet a system of patronage and stiff legal protections make it is difficult for employers to fire anyone. Years of such stagnation in France's hierarchy-obsessed society have produced elaborate rituals to keep people busy.
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"Work is organized a little like the court of Louis XIV - very complicated and very ritualized so that people feel they are working effectively when they are not," she said.
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Her solution? Rather than keep up what she sees as an exhausting charade, people who dislike what they do should, as she puts it, discreetly disengage. If done correctly - and her book gives a few tips, like looking busy by always carrying a stack of files - few co-workers will notice, and those who do will be too worried about rocking the boat to complain. Given the difficulty of dismissing employees, she says, frustrated superiors are more likely to move such subversive workers up than out.
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The book's title is a play on "Bonjour Tristesse," the title of the 1954 best-selling novel by Françoise Sagan that recounted a worldly young woman's cynical approach to relationships and sex.
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Maier's book, subtitled "the art and necessity of doing the least possible in a corporation," is concerned with a more mundane malaise.
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With chapters titled, "The Morons Who Are Sitting Next to You," and "Beautiful Swindles," it declares that corporate culture is nothing more than the "crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment."
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Her employers of 12 years were not amused. Irritated that she had identified herself on the back cover of her book as an employee of Électricité de France, they wrote her a stern letter accusing her of inattention at meetings, leaving work early and "spreading gangrene from within," just as her book advocates. They demanded that she appear for a disciplinary hearing, though the original Aug. 17 date has been pushed back to September. That's because Maier is going on vacation.
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"They want to make an example of me," Maier said.
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When she received the letter from her employer, she did what any French worker would do: She took it to the company union and asked it to help in her defense. The union, already engaged in a bitter battle with management over a plan for partial privatization, took the case to the news media, where it received instant and widespread attention.
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Without the company's maneuver, Maier's book probably would have quietly gone out of print. Instead, her publisher, Éditions Michalon, sold out the first printing of 4,000 copies and has ordered three successive reprints in the past three months: 15,000 copies have been printed so far and, with its having apparently struck a chord with the country's work force, demand appears to be growing.
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Maier said the reaction of co-workers had been mixed, with some outraged by her thankless attitude.
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"They think it scandalous," she said, "like I spit in my soup." Craig S. Smith can be reached at pagetwo@iht.com.