Americans in France on the reasons for the riots

Some American women I know here, mostly married to French men, have been talking about the causes of the riots by email. I think what they have to say is interesting and shows how hard it is in France to get a job, or for small employers to hire someone, as well as how the fonctionnaires constitute a privileged class, who are also the main people who make France suffer the endless strikes that plague the country. The public transport strike in Marseilles has been going on for more than a month now, crippling the city.
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From C:

"L, I agree with what you say about lack of enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.  But that's not the only problem.

"A huge proportion of jobs are blocked because they are considered civil service and require exams having nothing to do with the actual requirements of the job.  This increases the number of incompentents in jobs for life, while people who do have the necessary skills are locked out.   It also means that once in the job, the fonctionnaires don't have any real motivation to produce after they pass a certain level.   Furthermore, with the changes in retirement laws, etc; what is happening is that the "contractual" jobs in which outside people could be hired for fixed renewable contracts are now being reserved for nonfunctional fonctionnaires (example :   long-distance teaching and administration of the CNED [Centre national d'enseignement à distance, National center for distance learning).  Furthermore, with typical institutionally xenophobic instincts, the concours [competitions] themselves have been tightened in the face of Europe so as to limit even more the potential of foreign-educated candidates succeeding.  Example:  if you take the CAPES [Certificat d'Aptitude au Professorat de l'Enseignement du Second Degré, or Certificate of aptitute as a professor in secondary teaching] in English, scorewise, you can succeed even if you fail all the English parts, whereas you may well fail the exam if your English is perfect, but your French is not native.  This totally aside from the inherent cultural bias of all the concours.

"Not just the concours, but all the exam oriented jobs.  Even cleaners now have to present a written "mémoire" in order to get their diploma to do cleaning....  People who want to work in rural old-age homes, helping the patients, bathing, serving meals, have to pass a BEP [Brevet d’Enseignement Professionnel, or professional-school diploma] level in English!  My husband had an adult student a few years ago who was in his 40s, had had a terrible accident, and couldn't continue his job as a welder.  He had to master English in order to a manual job...  My husband gave him a 10 out of 20, even though he could barely say a word, because it was so absurd a situation."

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From L:

"France hasn’t changed all that much and still, as ever, has a « let them eat cake » style ruling class.  On one hand, there are the privileged, and on the other, the have-nots (and “likely-never-will-haves”).  Alongside these, and since the last heads rolled, a sort of “middle class” has quietly been developing, and this, despite the age-old system still in place.  We are the ones who pay most of the taxes.  We earn too much to be have-nots and too little to be part of the privileged.

"I think that the privileged tend to (and prefer to) consider the silent “middle class” as the have-nots while ignoring that there are so many in this country who subsist on even less (and are out there seething about the injustice of it).

"In France, if you are over 50 and quit your job, you become unemployable…unless of course you graduated from the right school, in which case you become part of the “vivier” [meat supply] of highly sought after managers that the CAC 40 [the top companies] seek to hire.  In my opinion, a lot of the job-related discrimination stems directly from the lack of tough (and enforced) discrimination laws in hiring.  In California, hiring laws don’t allow an employer to ask a candidate’s age, marital status, whether or not they have any children, handicaps, etc… and most certainly, one cannot require that a photo accompany a resume!  The French are just beginning to warm up to the idea of imposing/enforcing stricter hiring rules…but they seem to be focusing on hiding the addresses (ie. the “neuf trois” style postal codes) [93, or neuf-trois, is the postal code for some of the worst-hit suburbs of Paris] and paying little attention to all the rest!.................PS : I find the word “scum” to have a much harsher connotation than “racaille” [the word that Nicolas Sarkozy used which inflamed the suburbs].  I always thought “loubard” and “racaille” to be on the same linguistic impact level as “hoodlum”…a notch harsher than “bully” though."

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From J:

"I'll weigh in with what I know on this one.

"1)  After 50, even a person with a grande école diploma has a very slim chance of getting work if he or she is laid off or quits.  Several of these désespérés [desperate ones] have been my clients; a couple are my brothers-in-law; a certain number are friends/colleagues/classmates of my husband's. Many of the "old boys" still employed live in fear of a restructuring which will put them onto the pavements; others jump for a package even though they would like to keep working, because the see the handwriting on the wall.  Outsourcing (délocalisation) of even managerial jobs in France is reaching epidemic proportions and will continue.

"2) When I worked in an underprivileged young adults' center as a volunteer, absurdities re jobs were legion.  The worst I encountered was a young woman who was accepted into a TWO-YEAR stage [internship] to become a housemaid in a hotel!  Yet the hotel industry is crying for employees.  Many smaller places close because they cannot find help, or because the 35 heures [35-hour work week] has made it impossible for the owners to make ends meet.

"3) In the small town near our country house, the local French do not want jobs in the nearby meat-processing plant.  They prefer to be chômeurs [unemployed] and get their unemployment.  This plant has started importing Africans from Mali to take these jobs....

"4) My husband... tells me that if as many service jobs were available in France proportionally as are available in the U.S. (bus boys in restaurants, clerks in supermarkets etc.), there would be virtually no unemployment here.  A combination of stringent labor laws which discourage potential employers, and RMI [Revenue minimum d'insertion, or guaranteed minimum income], Assedic [Association pour l'emploi dans l'industrie et le commerce, or Unemployment Office], and other government doles which de-motivate job seekers, have led to this situation.   I know the U.S. is far, far from perfect, but unskilled immigrants can find work and are able to raise themselves.  An example:  a Russian immigrant drove me out to the N.Y. airport last Saturday.  He found work driving a taxi upon arriving 7 years ago -- he has a wife and two kids -- and has started studying night to become a physical therapist.

"These gray-suited capitalists are not the only ones to blame.  Politicians here are career politicians; if not re-elected, they have no job.  In the U.S., they usually have another métier, and just go back to that when they lose.  Here, they must pander to their electorates to keep their salaries rolling in.  The French electorate is change-resistant, which is why the pols keep backing down."

Comments

[amerloque]

Hi !

Amerloque must admit that reading these comments – so full of "yakas" and "fokons" by, one supposes, well-meaning people who are apparently not too aware of the real France around them but who see the problems with American eyes and apply particularly American solutions – is quite frustrating. (smile)

Two of the comments almost sent Amerloque into gales of laughter. Amerloque hates to say it, but they're so … so culturecentric …

"We are the ones who pay most of the taxes."

Not really. Personal income tax is actually quite low for the majority of French people, compared to the USA. (Amerloque is not speaking of senior executives' taxes, but of "normal" French employees.) Something like 13 million French households file an annual income tax return … and over half of them pay no income tax whatsoever: they are exempt. Many of the normal entitlements are simply not taxed. VAT (TVA) accounts for, I believe, over twice as much gov't revenue as income tax. Companies are heavily taxed but individual taxpayers ? Not really. One should reduce one's consumption if one does not want to pay VAT. (smile) If cutting taxes means seriously reducing the standard of living for the common woman/man (as has apparently happened in the USA, based on what Amerloque has seen recently) then the French won't buy it, no matter how many politicians advocate it.

"Politicians here are career politicians; if not re-elected, they have no job. "

Not really. The majority (70% 80%) of national politicians are on leave – "en détachement" – from their civil service jobs – in the Education Nationale, for example, or the Inspection des Finances, or some other corps d'origine. Amerloque remembers seeing once a while back that 62% of the Assemblée Nationale of one of the "leftist" gov'ts was made up of individuals from the Education Nationale en détachement. Nowadays "les Finances" accounts for a lot of deputés … The question is more nuanced for local politicos, who receive a fixed stipend and frequently keep their "real" jobs.

By the way, the whole question of "service jobs" is, of course, linked to salaries. Employers are frequently unwilling to pay what the job is worth - just as in the USA. It's a race to the bottom which no one will win. Another part of the problem is simply the word "service", which far too many French people confuse with the word "servitude". (smile)

Note, too, that last time Amerloque looked, a few years ago, he was surprised to see that, according to the OECD (or perhaps it was another int'l organization: they're hard to keep track of), the country which had lost the most annual working days to strikes, when computed on a per capita basis, was … the United States of America.

Best,
L'Amerloque

[Nouria]

I don't agree with everything they have said but I do agree with some. My parents came to France to have better life than in Algeria. They always made clear education and hard work was the path to a better life. Our schools were not as good as those in Paris but we studied and had good education. I have two brothers and one sister. All but one have left France. Even with our education and our hard work we could not find good jobs. I was born in France and will always love it but all my life I felt like an outsider. I am just as French as anyone but was not treated as such. I moved to Toronto and it was like another world. I found a good job within my field in a month and didn't feel the discrimination I felt at home. I lived in Canada for three years before I moved to America. It took me three weeks to find a good job. My boss is minority as are many of my collegues . I feel if you work hard in north america you can get ahead and be accepted. This was not the case for me in France.I have a brother here and sister in Montreal. My parents and brother visited me and now want to come live here or Montreal. I do love France but I don't want my cildren to go through what we did.I feel finally my hard work has paid of the sad thing is I had to leave my home to find a better life.
I don't like violence but I understand the anger and hopeless feeling. I think all will be good but the unerlying problems must be thought .

[Nouria]

The post above made me curious .I looked at figures from two European labor organizations (based statistics on OECD data) and the countries which lost most annual working days to strikes per 1000 workers were Denmark, Finland, Italy and Spain NOT USA or France. Japan had the lowest days lost to strikes.

From Sedulia:

I admit France doesn't have the most days lost to strikes but I suspect the public suffers more from French strikes since it is usually public workers who strike in France and often at the last minute.

[amerloque]

Hi Nouria !

>>The post above made me curious .
>>I looked at figures from two European
>>labor organizations (based statistics on
>>OECD data) and the countries which
>>lost most annual working days to strikes
>>per 1000 workers were Denmark, Finland,
>>Italy and Spain NOT USA or France.
>>Japan had the lowest days lost to strikes.

Thanks for updating Amerloque on this ! As he said "… that last time Amerloque looked, a few years ago …" – it must've been just after the 2002 elections, when the "French competitiveness" issue began hitting the front pages (smile) Of course, he is unable today, at this very minute, naturally, to put his hands on the exact study with the statistic. (sigh ... it is ever thus ...)

Just went onto Internet, but unable to find the requisite stat. (re-sigh) On the Federation of European Employers (i.e., only European countries, at http://www.fedee.com/strikes.html), in its European League Table of Strikes and Lockouts, the ones with the most annual working days lost are: Greece, Iceland, Spain, Italy and Sweden. France is only 14th in number of days lost - in Europe, anyway. Over on Nationmaster (i.e., the world, at http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/lab_str), the ranking yields Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Spain and Norway. France is is 10th, while the USA is 11th.

Best,
L'Amerloque

PS: ... who came to France for a better life. (smile)