It's always something

Back in France-- off with the sleeveless white linen, on with the coats and turtlenecks!

The new plumber came over with his daughter, who is studying to be an architect. "It's important for her to see how plumbing works." We drank coffee together. They took it black with one sugar, like most French people.

She is in the fourth year of a five-year program. "It used to be six," she said, "but they changed it to five last year with the reform." She lives at home with her parents in Paris, like most students her age. School is free, but that means that lots of students are studying subjects where there are very few jobs available, like sociology, psychology and even architecture.

I heard a slight accent and asked the plumber if he were originally from Paris. "I am from Bordeaux," he said, "but I've lived in Paris since 1968."

"A soixante-huitard?" I said. [The name given to the student protesters of '68. I never did understand what they were protesting about; the Americans had the Vietnam war. I have the impression, perhaps wrong, that the '68 French protests, like World War I, were essentially caused by a need for excitement.]

"Yes, I wanted to see what was happening," he said, "so I came up to Paris when I was twenty and never left."

The CPE strikes have ended and all the universities are back in session. But this is France. The intermittents du spectacle, part-time workers in the entertainment industry, are now protesting the rule that says they can't get unemployment benefits unless they work at least 507 hours, ten months a year (can you imagine how happy American actors would be with that!). Yesterday they occupied the offices of the business newspaper La Tribune. Looks bad for the festivals this summer.

[The poster above says: "Unlimited strike." The poster on the left says: "Is there a life for live shows, audiovisual, and movies after the death of the intermittent workers?"]

Comments

[L'Amerloque]

Hi Sedulia !

/*/The intermittents du spectacle, part-time workers in the entertainment industry, are now protesting the rule that says they can't get unemployment benefits unless they work at least 507 hours, ten months a year (can you imagine how happy American actors would be with that!)./*/

Sedulia - this figure of "507 hours" is a theoretical figure, not a real one. It's even better that one thinks, for the intermittents … this is one of the biggest rackets currently being perpetrated on the French people.

The system is based on "cachets", not hours. So many "cachets" paid turn by magic into so many hours "worked". The hours are "coefficientées". Basically, the higher the cachet, the more hours. It is not reality-based. So an actor in the theatre might only do one cachet in one day, which makes n hours, while a cinema actress (one is paid more in the cinema than in the theatre ...) might do four cachets on the same day, which will be counted as 4n. There is nothing to suggest that each person works the same number of minutes or hours, either. (smile)

More info:

"C'est pourquoi les artistes préfèrent que les répétitions soient payées sous forme de cachets puisque que 4 heures d'activité sont alors comptées pour 8 ou 12 heures ; on obtient ainsi plus vite les 507 heures exigées, mais c'est une fraude à l'indemnisation au titre du chômage. Le cachet est un mode de paiement retenu uniquement pour la représentation, précisément parce qu'il permet de déterminer un nombre théorique d'heures, par effet multiplicateur. D'où l'enjeu autour du paiement en cachets, qui présente un avantage certain pour le calcul des droits des intermittents."

http://www.cortex-culturemploi.com/France/auc/journees/actes/pau/debat4.html

Still more ? Here we go:

Exemple : En 10 mois 1/2, Mme W, comédienne, à fait 50 cachets isolés payés , chacun 100 euros brut.
Elle a donc fait 50 X 12 = 600 heures.

http://sosrock.free.fr/intermittence.htm

Finally …

(about cachets morphing into hours …)

Cette équivalence se calcule à la fin de chaque mois, par employeur, que les cachets soient successifs ou non.
Exemple : 2 périodes de 5 jours chez deux employeurs différents équivalent à 60x2= 120 heures.
2 périodes de 5 jours chez un même employeur équivalent à 115 heures.

http://www.cip-idf.org/IMG/pdf/NMNAT-2.pdf.

Of course, in the above example, nothing says that one "jour" is 8 hours (smile). In the example before that, a "cachet isolé" could be a half hour or fifteen minutes, for example.

One should not be surprised at the virulence of the "intermittents": this is one of the biggest "fromages" in France !

Gosh, the newspapers and media sure haven't explained the way the hours are counted, eh ? Wonder why ? (wide wide grin)

Best,
L'Amerloque