Talk to the Snail

by Stephen Clarke

  As I said, the French work to live. Or, more precisely, they work to go on holiday. A French worker won’t bust their gut to be voted employee of the month and get their mugshot on the wall. But promise them enhanced lifestyle time, and they can work wonders.

  ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economists predict meltdown if a similar scheme were to be introduced in their countries. And they might be right. Because there is one major difference between the French and Anglo-Saxons.

  Give a Frenchman a long weekend and he’ll get in his French car, fill it with French petrol, drive to the French seaside, countryside or mountains, and spend three or four days eating and drinking French food and wine. Give a Brit the same opportunity and he’ll get in an Irish jet and fly to Bulgaria.

  The French travel abroad a lot, but a massive amount of their money stays at home. It seems too good to be true, but it is true – working less is good for the French economy.

  The End of the

  Thirty-Five-Hour Week?

  Under pressure from employers who say they’re paying a full-time salary for part-time work, and from right-wing politicians who say that the Anglo-Saxon model of overwork is good for the soul, the French government recently authorized companies to abolish the thirty-five-hour week. But everyone knows that any attempt to take rights away from French workers results in a national strike, so the increase in worktime is being dealt with in a typically French way. Employers will have to negotiate the increase with their employees, who can refuse and remain on thirty-five hours. And if the full-time working week is increased to thirty-nine hours again, employers will have to buy back the hours at the employees’ rate of salary. In other words, the employer will have to offer four hours’ pay, or a 10 per cent rise.

  And that’s supposed to be good for the employers?

  A State of Mind

  The people with the worst reputation for being relaxed during office hours are the fonctionnaires, the state workers. French comedian Coluche used to tell a joke: ‘My mum was a fonctionnaire, and my dad didn’t work either.’

  The fonctionnaires include teachers, the police, hospital workers, firefighters, all civil servants in government offices and researchers in state institutes. Post-office and transport workers are not exactly fonctionnaires, but have similar rights and are so numerous that they have as much power over the government as fonctionnaires do.

  Official statistics put the number of fonctionnaires at around 3.3 million. But one French magazine recently estimated that fonctionnaires or semi-fonctionnaires make up just over a quarter of the French workforce – six million workers. Whatever the figure, any government tries to reform the fonction publique at its peril. If it announces a plan to meddle with the éducation nationale, for example, there are not only a couple of million workers to go on strike, there are also all the students, who enjoy nothing better than a bit of educational rioting to prepare them for adult life.

  And the worst fonctionnaires often have the best careers. It is well known that the only way to get rid of a totally inefficient fonction publique manager is to promote them so that they go and annoy a bigger department.

  Fonctionnaire secretaries are the same. A friend of mine, a researcher, had a secretary who brought a TV into her office so that she could watch dubbed American soap operas in the afternoon. He complained to the head of department, who said there was nothing that could be done – if they annoyed her, all the secretaries in the institute would go on strike. My friend suffered for two years until he finally found another researcher who did so little work that he didn’t notice for six months that his previous secretary had retired. The TV-watcher filled that vacancy and my friend was saved.

  Similarly, if the director of a school wants to get rid of a teacher who shows DVDs every lesson, gets drunk every lunchtime and regularly comes back two weeks late after the summer break, they will have to offer the offender a transfer to a school in a more prestigious part of France. I spent a year working as an English assistant in a lycée in Perpignan, and although some of the English teachers did give a damn about the kids, several others were only there for the Pyrenees skiing and the Mediterranean watersports. One typical lesson I attended involved the teacher putting on a Charlie Chaplin video (great for improving their English conversation skills), yelling at his pupils to shut up, and going to the staffroom for a smoke. Très éducatif. And the only thing that the school director could have done was try to persuade him to transfer to Saint-Tropez.

  The fonctionnaires defend themselves by saying that in exchange for their jobs for life they get low pay and little chance of promotion. But the fonction publique can’t be that bad – a recent opening for an administrative assistant at the state’s institute for population studies, a job that did not even require the baccalauréat (equivalent to A levels), attracted more than eighty applicants, including several with doctorates.

  A stress-free job is a temptation that no French person can resist.

  Jobs for the Garçons

  Given all these incentives to laze about at work, it’s a wonder that the French get anything done. But they do. Without making a fuss, they build bridges, motorways, railways, whole new towns, with incredible speed.

  Part of the reason for this is that they don’t really listen to environmental opposition. So what if a few sandal-wearing tree-lovers don’t want the new TGV line to slice through their valley? People need to get to the beach or the ski resorts quickly. So the new line gets built in less time than it takes to fix a date for an initial public inquiry in Britain.

  Another reason is that major building projects are kept in the French family.

  Compare, for example, France’s and England’s national stadiums. The French decided to build a new stadium for the 1998 World Cup, so they gave the job to French firms and it was finished in January, six months before the tournament began. England decided it needed a new stadium, knocked down the old one, outsourced the building work to a foreign firm11 and immediately lost all control of the to a foreign firm budget and deadline. The result – it was late and turned out to be the most expensive stadium in world history.

  Vive la méthode française.

  Inefficient Efficiency

  We Anglo-Saxons are forever giving ourselves targets. This makes us feel very efficient, even if we fail to meet them. Yes, we boast, we have increased the number of daily targets by 10 per cent. OK, we missed 90 per cent of those targets, but by setting ourselves more targets tomorrow we will improve our target-setting efficiency, and produce lots of lovely Powerpoint graphs.

  The French give themselves far fewer targets at work, for two main reasons.

  First, they spend their whole time at school haunted by targets. Every single thing they do there is graded out of twenty and recorded on a report card. By the time they get to work they’re traumatized by targets.

  Second, they daren’t give themselves too many targets because they know they will miss them.12 But perversely, this lack of goals doesn’t make them less efficient.

  Look at the fuss caused by the British obsession with the first-class post. There are probably more British post-office workers studying how to deliver first-class letters on time than there are delivering letters.

  The French have two classes of letter, too, but they don’t care about their ‘first class’ (or tarif normal, as they modestly call it) letters arriving within twenty-four hours. French businesses get on with opening the letters they have actually received that morning rather than worrying about the ones that might be on their way.

  The Brits are so obsessed with performance statistics that performance actually gets worse. I was recently on a train from London to Luton Airport. I wanted to get off at St Albans, midway along the route. But when we got to the first stop outside Central London, it was announced that because the train was running ten minutes late it would be going direct to Luton Airport so as not to miss its performance target. I, and most of the other passengers, had to get off and wait twenty minutes for the next tr
ain. The result: the train was on time but the passengers were late. A stroke of British management genius.

  A French train, even one of the slightly worse-for-wear ones on the Paris suburban lines, would never do this. It would trundle on to the terminus, running a few minutes late, and the commuters would finish their newpapers, send a few extra text messages, and not care a bit about the ten minutes they had theoretically lost.

  French trains do break down and they can be disastrously late, but over all they are much more efficient than British trains, and I’m sure it’s because the French railways spend less of their resources on studying lateness and more on trains.

  Meeting of Minds (and Tongues)

  Until I came to work in France, I was under the naïve impression that meetings were meant to produce decisions.

  I quickly learned that the purpose of a French meeting is to listen to oneself (and, if absolutely necessary, others) talk. If you want to reach a decision then you’ll have to arrange another meeting.

  At the press group where I worked, all meetings were given a start and end time, and woe betide anyone who tried to finish a meeting early. If a meeting to discuss, say, the name of a new magazine was scheduled to last two hours, there was no way that a brilliant name suggested ten minutes into the discussion was ever going to be adopted.

  This happened once at a meeting I was actually chairing, and I managed to end the proceedings less than half an hour after they had got under way. When my boss found out about this premature evacuation of the meeting room, she insisted that we hold another meeting to talk about whether we had come to the right decision.

  Our meetings rarely had an agenda, and if they did it was almost always ignored. We would get to item two of ten, someone would start philosophizing about an idea they had had while staring at the numbers on the agenda, and suddenly we were so far away from the supposed subject that we would never get back on track. Items three to ten would be forgotten for ever.

  Not that this made us less efficient. Sometimes, I realized, it is best not to make decisions. By the time we finally got round to trying to resolve a problem, it would have either solved itself or become irrelevant. It is better to have no decision at all than a wrong or hasty decision.

  Again, French ‘inefficiency’ is actually more efficient. Vive l’inaction.

  I Strike, Therefore I Am

  In my novel A Year in the Merde, there is a running joke that lots of people take seriously. Instead of a plat du jour, a dish of the day, there’s the grève du mois, the strike of the month. Everyone’s at it – transport workers, the police, waiters, pharmacists, even porn actors. This was meant to be an exaggeration of what it feels like living in strike-torn France, and attentive readers might have noticed how coincidental it is that in the chapter about Paul West’s battle against dog poo, the street cleaners down brushes, condemning Paul’s shoes to an even thicker coating of caca.

  Attempted satire aside, it is true that the French strike a lot. And the reason is obvious – their strikes work spectacularly well.

  One of the main reasons is that instead of a stoppage by the Union of Left-handed Carburettor Polishers, a whole industry or the entire country will go on strike at once, so the government and employers almost always back down.

  Union members in any industry, in any company, will probably belong to one of five big unions – the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), FO (Force Ouvrière), CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), CFTC (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens) and Sud, a new and powerful breakaway from the CFDT. If, for example, the CGT calls all its members out, it can paralyse trains, buses, factories, hospitals, power stations and TV channels (which is sometimes no bad thing).

  Often, the only things weakening the strikes are the unions themselves, as they are fierce rivals. So a Paris transport strike can be undermined if all the CFDT drivers 13 stop work but the Sud members turn up out of spite.

  The reasons for strikes are sometimes purely symbolic. Train drivers will decide, for example, that the government should do more to improve the lot of the ordinary worker, and will call a one-day strike (thereby depriving the ordinary worker of a day’s pay). Some people say that one of the reasons why Paris lost the 2012 Olympics was that, on the day the Olympic Committee was visiting the city, Paris transport workers came out on a twenty-four-hour strike. The city authorities begged the unions to postpone their day of action, but were told that it would be too complicated to re-schedule. The strike went ahead, the Olympic Committee saw a paralysed transport system, and London got the Games.

  There is almost always a city in France without public transport because of a strike. Paris is usually hit as soon as the weather starts getting bad in winter. The reasons vary – sometimes it is because drivers are being attacked on suburban lines and want more protection. At other times it is just because the transport workers want to show how powerful they are.

  Whatever the reason, though, commuters are remarkably tolerant. For the first couple of days there is total anarchy, with fights breaking out as people getting off buses stomp on the heads of people getting on – but then things settle down and a sort of resigned solidarity kicks in. People without access to a car start to hitchhike to work, get their bikes out of the cellar, or simply walk. And when interviewed by TV reporters, they will often say that they support the strikers. Any strike for workers’ rights ultimately protects all the workers.

  Plus, of course, if there’s a strike by one group of workers, everyone has a good excuse for working less.

  Striking a Blow

  Big national strikes are usually a cause for celebration. The strikers take to the streets and it’s carnival time. The unions unfurl their banners and get out the recruitment leaflets. Train- and bus-loads of singing, laughing, face-painted strikers migrate to the big cities14 and the streets echo to the howl of megaphones and the squeaking of union leaders’ scalps as their heads swell along with their new public profile. Cafés along the route of the march make a fortune, and the demonstrators’ eyes water at the paraffin smoke billowing out from the merguez (North African spicy sausage) stands that line the route.

  At the end of the demonstration, as the media are always keen to show, people’s eyes can start watering for a different reason. Recently, French protest marches have tended to end in clouds of tear gas and baton charges. This is not because strikers lose their temper – strikes, as I said, are more about carnival than carnage – but because big crowds attract gangs of so-called casseurs. These ‘breakers’, or vandals, are usually kids from the poor outer suburbs of the city, who see the protest march as an opportunity to loot shops, steal mobile phones from posh middle-class protesters and throw things at the police.

  At the end of the demonstration (which always finishes at a pre-determined place), the protesters disperse to catch their trains and buses home or go for a self-congratulatory drink, and the casseurs take over. The plain-clothes policemen in the crowd wade in, make some media-friendly arrests by dragging young men across the tarmac by their hair, the riot police do their gladiator thing, and the world media have their ‘Paris under siege’ headline.

  But, like everything in French society, these riots are stage-managed. Canny protesters get well out of the way before the riot begins. Local residents park their cars a few streets away. Shopkeepers lower their shutters. Many protest groups now hire their own security to identify and take out the casseurs. And recent student demonstrations have been patrolled by the young people’s parents, babysitting the protest march. Nothing must spoil the carnival.

  Wagging the Chien

  One of the reasons why the French feel a sense of worker solidarity even during a long transport strike is that they feel such a passionate hatred for their bosses, les patrons.

  Since the revolutionaries decapitated the aristocracy, France has had plenty of time to create a new elite. And this elite does everything it can to distance itself from the grubby people o
n the production line. TF1, France’s biggest commercial TV station, wanted to make a reality TV series in which a company chairman would spend a day doing the most menial job in his company. But they could not find a single volunteer amongst French patrons. In the end, they had to use a Belgian.

  A French chairman demean himself by doing hands-on work for a day? Pas possible!

  Despite French scoffing at the British class system, which school you went to is infinitely more important in France than in the UK. How many of Britain’s top business people went to Eton or Oxford? Hardly any. In France, on the other hand, both the private and public sector are basically run by graduates of the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration), the school that turns out the country’s top civil servants.

  I have heard countless people moaning that their department has just been handed over to a young Enarque (ENA graduate) who knows absolutely nothing about the business and who immediately sets about sabotaging perfectly good working practices by applying the outdated theory he has just learned at school. The most important subject in the French curriculum is mathematics, so in general the ability to do complicated calculations and produce pretty graphs is considered much more useful than a true knack for business.

  Most recent presidents of France have come from the ENA, which explains why they seem to know nothing about running a country – a lot like monarchs, in fact. The French recognize this. I have heard a joke variously aimed at the ENA, the HEC (Haute Ecole de Commerce), France’s most prestigious, incredibly expensive business school, and the Ecole Polytechnique, the top engineering school. For the sake of argument I’ll aim it at the ENA. The joke goes something like this:

  There’s a rowing race between ENA graduates and a team of ordinary workers, ten rowers to each boat. The first time they race, the workers win by half a length. The ENA does a study, decides that its team lacked leadership and replaces two of the rowers in the boat with a Rowing Director and a Rowing Coach.