The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  Yet more than anything, when it comes to what they do for a living, the French are simply evasive, even, as Julie saw, when the context begs the question. Julie was researching France’s language-protection movement when she discovered that most of the “defenders” of the French language were actually volunteers, many retired. At one of the larger associations she visited, one volunteer literally squirmed in his seat when she asked him, out of mere curiosity, what he used to do for a living. The gentleman wouldn’t disclose his job title until Julie pressed him to. It turned out he had been a journalist who wrote publicity for a French bank, nothing to be ashamed of. But even in professional situations, it is normal for the French to be tight-lipped about their working lives.

  Curiously, once the French feel assured they are in the company of friends, the floodgates open. That’s when you find out that behind the hedonistic image, the French are as obsessed with work as North Americans are. But they aren’t concerned about the same issues in their working lives.

  The French actually work long days, even with the official thirty-five-hour workweek. A typical workday in France is not nine to five, but nine to seven, mostly because the French are encouraged to take long lunches. Of course, longer workdays mean longer school days. The elementary school days are not the same every day, but most days start at 8:30 A.M. and end at 4:30 P.M. (with a two-hour lunch break), and many kids stay at school until 6:00 P.M. thanks to a gamut of reasonably priced after-school day care activities offered in schools.

  But the French workplace is quite a different universe than what North Americans are used to. When we returned to North America in 2001 and again in 2014, one of the main cultural countershocks we experienced was finding ourselves in the face of unapologetically incompetent employees. In New York or Phoenix, Montreal or Toronto, unless you are eating in an upscale restaurant, it’s not uncommon to be served by someone who doesn’t actually know that much about food. That’s rare in France where waitering is considered a profession with standards. In North America, taxi drivers who aren’t fluent in English (or French in our case) are not rare. Even in specialized retail outlets like bookstores, and especially in the large chains, it’s common for clerks to know relatively little about literature. The reason is simple. There are a lot of part-time employees in North America. Customers anticipate this and lower their expectations accordingly. There is simply much less part-time work in France. Service employees usually work full weeks and are generally well trained.

  The French have a lot of respect for métiers (a word that can refer to trade, occupation, or profession). One reason is that getting a métier in France requires a lot of effort and investment.

  Access to the French job market in any domain comes at a high price. Because the goal of French family education is to se placer (find a situation), as we saw in chapter 5, most French have invested heavily in the preparations. French families do whatever they can to help their children secure the best jobs possible. In many, if not most, cases, jobs are the result of a family investment geared to maximize a child’s performance in the system. Even bakers go to specialized schools to learn their métiers. Taxi drivers pay the equivalent of $300,000 for a taxi license.

  Part of the issue is that nothing about getting a job in France is simple. The French job market is more rigid and less mobile than anything a North American would experience. If you don’t like your job, switching careers or getting a different type of job is difficult. And if you started your career at the lower echelon of a business, there are few chances you’ll ever rise above midlevel: stories of people “working their way up from the bottom” are pretty rare in the French business world. Those who get to the top usually begin at least at midlevel because they attended one of the right specialized schools, les grandes écoles. The French job market is like the army: not many rank-and-file soldiers rise to general. Promotions come late, and people in positions of authority make sure the odds work against any new contenders.

  The only really surefire way to get ahead in France is by excelling in school. Luckily, the French school system is geared to mobility, at least more than systems elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, for instance, children are funneled into a specific educational track at the age of twelve. Before they start the equivalent of junior high, German kids have been identified either as university, trade school, or technical school material, and once they are categorized, there is hardly any turning back. In France, the determining factor in a young adult’s future doesn’t come until the famous bac exam students take at age eighteen. Because it’s the gateway to future careers, the bac is big. One reason teenagers rarely work summer or part-time jobs in France is that they are preparing for the bac. Families keep teenagers out of the job market so they can spend as much time as possible studying. If students aren’t spending their summers preparing for the next school year, parents expect them to “rest” so they can start the next year on the right foot.

  The family investment doesn’t stop there. Education in France is theoretically free, but at the end of high school, families generally spend between 1,200 and 1,500 euros for their children to take a dozen, if not two dozen, exams to win a much coveted spot in one of France’s grandes écoles. To take those exams, you need to study an additional two years in an extracurricular preparatory school, for which parents fork out another 5,000 euros per year for private ones. For the most prestigious public preparatory schools, which are free to those admitted, the government spends over 15,000 euros per year per student, or 4,000 more than it spends on students at public universities and double what it spends on average every year per student during the twelve years of schooling prior to university.3

  Whether they study at the highest level or just train for a trade, all French students must do a stage (internship) or a compagnonnage (apprenticeship), often for hundreds of hours, for no pay. It is a surprisingly exploitative system, especially considering that the labor market has so many protection measures for workers built into it, but for millions of French people, this is just how the working world works.4

  And even when you have grown up, finished school, and are working in a profession—whether you are a nurse, teacher, accountant, soldier, or have any position in the public sector—you still have to take exams to get promoted to a new position. Jean-Benoît was riding the train from the suburbs back to Paris after a hike with friends one Sunday when the train stopped in Arcueil. Across the street, Jean-Benoît noticed an eight-story building with a slightly frightening name: La Maison des Examens (The House of Exams), written in very large blue letters from roof to ground. Half a dozen members of the group exclaimed in an irruption of nostalgia: “Ah! La Maison des examens!” As it turned out, they, or one of their close relatives, all had come to this very establishment to take at least one concours (contest) or épreuve (test) to get a job or promotion, or to take a school exam. Many French spend a large chunk of their professional lives studying for tests. It’s one of the few ways you can climb the ladder in France or change tracks once you have chosen your educational path.

  So if the French work so hard to get into the job market, why are they so loath to express affection for their jobs? Whether garbage collectors or well-educated midlevel managers, French employees rarely have anything good to say because even employees higher up in the workplace hierarchy believe they only work because they have no choice, not because they want to. It’s unusual to hear even people at the top echelons of a profession say that they love their work. Most pretend that they work because they have no choice.

  Like many cultural traits in France, this attitude also has historical roots. The French word for business, les affaires, comes from the expression à faire, meaning “what is to be done”—the term dates to the twelfth century. The English word “business,” dating from the sixteenth century, comes from busy-ness—or the state of being busy, probably because industriousness was established as a key virtue in post-Reformation England. The French word affaires emphasizes how external d
emands force people to work, against their will.

  We met a specialist in labor relations, Professor Jean-Pierre Lebrun, of Laval University in Quebec City, who does consulting work both in Canada and in France. He told Jean-Benoît that the most striking feature of the way French people talk about their jobs is the recurrence of the word “mission.” In English, the term simply suggests one must go somewhere to accomplish a task. But in French, mission carries the meaning of having been dispatched to some task with the additional connotation of a moral responsibility of the person missionnée, “mission-ed,” to achieve the task. Even two executive managers in France will ask one another, “What’s your mission?” meaning, what orders have you been given? A mid- or upper-level manager with seven years of university studies will claim to be at least somewhat powerless in virtue of the fact that she has been missionnée.

  French business owners and shopkeepers of course find themselves in a conundrum because they can’t blame a boss for making them work—and can’t really pretend they didn’t choose their situation (position), unless they inherited it, of course. But owners and shopkeepers find other ways to project the distinctly passive posture the French assume whenever they talk about work. French shop owners, for instance, are amazingly forthcoming about the various problems they have serving the public, like troubles with their suppliers. The news seller in our neighborhood was a textbook case of this. He never told us his name, despite the fact that we chatted with him almost every day of the week for a year. Instead, he complained like clockwork about problems with his distributor, and about capricious clients—all with a smile.

  What the French will discuss with complete strangers is how hard work is, and what they enjoy doing when they are not working. The French openly embrace long lunches and long holidays—even if they can barely afford to take them—at least partly because it’s a way of showing how much they dislike working. They are also comfortable talking about wanting to retire as early as possible because it emphasizes how little work interests them. Gilles Davidas, a radio director we worked with at France Culture, was sixty-four at the time. In our first meeting he told us he would be retiring right after our show went on air. But it took him a month to admit he had mixed feelings about it. Although he was retiring voluntarily, he was having second thoughts. It was obvious to us that he still felt he had a lot to offer professionally and would miss his coworkers. Still, it was fascinating to watch an effective and committed director actually avoid saying he liked his job.

  The French of course love talking about holidays, but again, it’s often an indirect way of showing how little they like working. The French do take a lot of holidays. To some extent, the system forces them on people. French children get two weeks off around Halloween, two more weeks at Christmas, two weeks for a midwinter “ski break,” and then finally two weeks at Easter. That’s a total of eight weeks of holidays before the summer. Out of curiosity, we added up the number of days French kids spend at school (the school year is two weeks longer) and the number of hours they spend in class, and the total worked out to be roughly the same as the time they spent at elementary school back in Montreal. The difference is just that the French organize the school year to make a lot of two-week holidays.

  As if eight weeks of holidays aren’t enough, in May, just when we thought we were free from school holidays, the French drain the month of work days with a suite of statutory holidays, starting—somewhat ironically—with Workers’ Day (the Fête du Travail, on May 1), followed by V-day (May 8), and the Catholic Ascension Day holiday (forty days after Easter). Whenever these holidays fall on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, the French just go ahead and font le pont (make the bridge)—take an extra one or two days off to make a long weekend. So the month of May ends up being a series of four-day weekends combined with three-day workweeks.

  Even merchants take long holidays in France, closing shop sometimes for a month or more. In August, which the French don’t call August, but just les vacances, even one of the hotels in our neighborhood closed for the month. All the nearby butchers closed, including one for an impressive six weeks. (It was no wonder his stuff was so expensive, we realized, we were paying for his holidays.) Stores rarely closed just for a week (why bother?). More often they closed for between two and six weeks. When you spend the summer in Paris, you essentially walk around the city reading signs in store windows to figure out where you can get a hair cut or buy a light bulb. And the signs never include the words nous sommes désolés (we’re sorry), because of course, no one in France is going to apologize for not working.

  The question, of course, is how everyone can afford to take so much time off. Holidays are considered a basic necessity, like hot water, and the French refer to their holidays as an “expense,” not a “splurge.” Throughout the year, as each vacation approached, we noticed parents started complaining like clockwork about how “tired” their kids were and how much they needed to “rest” (although curiously, teachers always assigned homework for the holidays). Even people who can barely afford holidays still find a way to take them. One cost-cutting technique is to squat at a parents’ or in-laws’ country home, or even just their regular home. It’s also very common for couples to send children chez mami et papi (to grandma and grandpa’s house) for long stretches of the summer. (We never really heard how grandparents felt about this, but it sounded like they never got much say in the matter.) And not everyone actually goes away. One of the ritual once-a-year stories in the French press is the vacances-des-pauvres (holidays for the poor), or les exclus des vacances (the holiday underclass), on how poor people manage to take holidays.5

  But as much—or perhaps even more—than holidays and benefits, when the French talk about work, it’s all about “contracts.” Even street artists and buskers have job contracts in France. As we discovered, you can’t work in France without one, even if you are a foreigner, and a freelancer. When we produced our radio show at France Culture, we had to sign two contracts, one about copyright, another specifically for intermittents du spectacle (casual entertainment workers and artists). In the latter, we agreed to make a mandatory contribution to unemployment insurance and vacation pay. That even gave us the right to strike. Among the few strikes that did take place the year we were in France, one was by the intermittents du spectacle: in principle, we should have been out on the streets protesting, too.

  Sophie Maura, a friend who works as a labor lawyer, informed us there are no fewer than forty-eight different types of work contracts in France. They are divided into CDI and CDD: CDI stands for contrat à durée indéterminée, and that’s a permanent job. A CDD is a contrat à durée déterminée, meaning temporary work. The CDI is the basic work contract, which 85 percent of French workers have: it provides remarkable protection, including mandatory compensation in case your position is eliminated (including unemployment insurance and health coverage, which go without saying).6 Of course, not all businesses can afford to give people permanent positions, especially with all the perks this entails—not even the French government can. So the French have created a byzantine labor system that is a maze of contracts. For French workers who do not have a CDI (15 percent of the workforce), there are forty-seven different types of CDD, ranging from one-month job contracts to contracts for probation periods. The rare youngsters who do work summer jobs, for instance, sign a CDD. The CDD for employees on probation automatically becomes a CDI after the CDD has been renewed once or twice. Other CDDs are not renewable. The nuances of France’s many CDDs still elude us.7

  It’s easy to see why the French are obsessed with work contracts. The first thing landlords, moneylenders, or insurance salespersons—and occasionally even people in sales—want to know from you is not just how much you earn, but what kind of work contract you have. That tells them everything they need to know about your financial security. Getting a loan without a permanent work contract is next to impossible, as is taking out a mortgage or even renting an apartment. The first time we rented
in France, we had to call Jean-Benoît’s father back home and ask him to sign as a guarantor, even though back in Montreal, we had already owned (and sold) our first home.

  The French know perfectly well that the rigidities of their labor market, specifically the contract system, form huge obstacles to hiring. But our attempts to discuss this topic usually ran into a brick wall. When we argued that getting rid of the contract system would free the labor market, people were incredulous. Most French people simply just can’t contemplate a job market without contracts. Back in 2005, then prime minister Dominique de Villepin tried to simplify the job-contract maze. The move sparked huge protests as people pointed out the obvious: without permanent job contracts, no one would be able to get insurance or sign a lease.8 And that was the end of that.

  Job contracts are also a product of the ingrained French belief that work must be rationed. The French, like all Europeans to some extent, embrace this very Malthusian idea. They know there is growth and that growth creates jobs, but they cannot help but think that there is only so much work to go around. Perhaps once you have your piece of the cake, the French think it’s just better to keep the news to yourself.

  To be fair, the French are also fixated on job contracts because of a legitimate fear that without them, business owners will necessarily exploit laborers. It’s a mentality more suited to the era before the industrial revolution, but it’s understandable. Prior to World War II, French capitalism was harsh. Much of the contract system and social protection in France was subsequently designed to protect workers from being exploited. To this day, business owners in France can show themselves to be pretty remorseless in their decision making. One of the big scandals of 2013 was the discovery that a loophole in European labor regulations allowed businesses to hire workers from other countries and avoid paying benefits. But there was an even bigger scandal behind it: among the 144,000 “foreign” workers hired in France, the second largest group were French (after Polish). French companies had somehow found a way to hire French workers outside of the country and avoid paying them benefits back in France.9 When we arrived in France, we tried to open a bank account, but since we came from abroad and had no job contract (being self-employed), three banking institutions told us they “could not” open an account for us. Their claim was not only false. It was also illegal. We thought our problem was an isolated incident, then learned that Bank of France had intervened 51,000 times in 2013 (up 20 percent from the previous year) to force French banks to follow the law. One bank, the Société générale, had been fined $2.5 million (2 million euros) for discrimination.10