Simplifying the wonderfully complicated world of French employment law - a possibility?

Ah the madness that is French employment law.

Every evening on Europe 1, journalist David Abiker has a spot called "La geule de l'emploi" in which he takes a look at working France from a number of different angles.

On Thursday's edition he highlighted a one-line bill which Jean-Pierre Decool, a member of parliament for the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) wants to introduce.

It concerns employment law.

You know - the whole body of law and administrative rulings that covers everything and anything to do with the relationship between employer and employee; the contract of employment, minimum wage, working time, health and safety, discrimination....(thank you to someone at Wikipedia)

In short it's supposed to provide rights which will protect an employee from any mistreatment by their employer and regulate the relationship between the two.

Yes it's hard to give a Daily Mail-type summary of something so complicated and of course the French have found a way of making an already complex subject even more confusing.

And because Decool thinks that French employment law is just a little (well actually a lot) out of synch with 21st century requirements, he wants to simplify matters and make the whole area much more - for want of a better word - transparent.

The sheer bulk of legislation is particularly overwhelming for small and medium-side enterprises as far as Decool and probably many others are concerned.

Look at some of the examples he quotes in the introduction to his bill. They need to be treated carefully of course, but Abiker wasn't disputing them during his report.

In 1973 there were 600 articles enshrined in employment law in France. Today there are 10,000.

In Switzerland employment law apparently contains just 54 articles

In France there are, says Decool, currently 30 different forms of a contract of employment. In the United Kingdom there's just one.

In France, if you're fired you have five years to contest your dismissal. In Spain it's apparently just 20 days.

Take a pay slip in France and you'll be faced with 24 lines. In the UK there are just four.

While multinationals can employ armies of lawyers to work their way through the mass of legislation and the small text to ensure they're complying with the law, Decool insists smaller companies simply cannot afford either the time or the money.

And that's not to mention the impact it can have on any foreign investor thinking of setting up shop in France and faced with 10,000 articles with which they have to comply.

On his blog, Abiker helpfully provides a pdf file to Decool's proposal which you can download and read through at your leisure.

He also has a link to a great video from former minister Rama Yade in which she talks about exactly the difference between formulating laws governing employment during her (pre-ministerial) time as an administrator in the Senate and actually putting them into practice...which she has had to do since she joined the private sector to work for a human resources company.

"When I was a Senate administrator I 'made' the law: in other words I assembled all the different elements to produce something that could actually be voted on," she says.

"And I was especially happy when it came to employment law, because I thought I had summarised things pretty well," she continues.

"Now I'm seeing things from the other side and having to put into practice some of those things that I actually wrote and I just have to ask myself, how I could have written what I did  because quite simply some of the things just cannot be applied to the workplace."

Yep, employment law is a very necessary and noble part of any modern day society, but does it really need to be so absurdly complex and confusing as France would appear to have us all believe?

Parliament seems to think so.

Claude Guéant's "France doesn't need foreign bricklayers and waiters" racist remarks

Proving once again that he is in no way a racist and only makes comments that are factually correct and amount to the truth because he says so, France's interior minister Claude Guéant was back on familiar territory at the weekend.

Claude Guéant (from Wikipedia)

This time it was to tell the French that the country didn't need immigrants to fill positions as waiters in restaurants or builders because France already had enough people to fill the vacancies.

In a marvellous train of logic that seems to have become a Guéant speciality, the interior minister pointed to the country's 2.6 million unemployed, some of whom could presumably take up those low-paid jobs in restaurants and learn to flex their muscles as builders.

What he said during a radio interview on Sunday showed a true understanding of the nature of unemployment and how to get people back to work.

"Those people who are looking for a job cannot refuse to take up positions indefinitely and should have their benefit cut if they don't at some point take what they're being offered," he said.

"It's true that we need immigrants with skills and talents," he said, seeming to backtrack on comments he made a couple of weeks ago on the need to reduce legal immigration; comments which were also criticised by some within his own party at the time.

But remember this is Claude Guéant and what might at first appear to be a softening in tone turns out to be anything other and that.

"There are about 2,000 people we really need every year who have those skills and talents," he continued.

"But we don't need bricklayers or waiters because France already has the resources to fill those posts."

Ah the sensitivity and insight of the man!

Of course Gueant would probably deny that his comments are aimed at currying favour with those inclined to vote for the far-right Front National during the next presidential and parliamentary elections in 2012.

But that's exactly what Dominique Sopo, the president of the anti-racist non-governmental organisation SOS Racisme, thinks are behind the interior minister's thinking.

"There's currently a trend to create among the French a mistrust of foreigners as part of an attempt to appeal to those who might be attracted to the Front National," he said.

"But the direct consequence of these remarks is the rise in popularity of Marine Le Pen (the leader of the Front National) to an unprecedented level, one year away from the presidential elections."

Guéant might not yet have taken up the tongue-in-cheek offer Le Pen made of "honorary membership" of her party in March.

That offer came after his comments that the French were becoming worried about feeling at home in their own country.

But he's going the right way about securing himself another governmental job - maybe even as prime minister - should the unthinkable happen next year and the French return a far-right president: be that Le Pen or Nicolas Sarkozy.

A French firm where workers are busy doing nothing - and getting paid for it

Every day Carmen Girard turns up for work at National Power Packs in Pontarlier in the département of Doubs in eastern France.

The 36-year-old has been working for the company, which assembles rechargeable batteries, for 15 years.

But since June, Girard and her four female colleagues have quite literally had nothing to do.

And they're getting a regular monthly income for not doing it.

A month earlier their boss informed them that assembly and production were being transferred to facilities just outside of Rotterdam in the Netherlands where he lives and that the company in Pontarlier was effectively ceasing its activities.

The machinery has remained in place and so have the five employees. They weren't fired - and still haven't been.

Instead they have received their regular monthly salaries for doing absolutely nothing apart from turning up each day.

A typical day starts for Girard at 8.30am.

"First of all I deal with my personal letters and emails, then we watch television, play Scrabble, Rubik's Cube or Sudoku," she said on Laurent Ruquier's afternoon radio programme, On va s'gêner.

"It's like a phantom company right now - 440 square metres with nothing to do," she added.

There has been no sign of life from their boss, apart from a couple of emails informing them of the closure and instructing them to tie up loose ends with customers.

And in spite of repeated attempts to reach him, he's no longer answering his mobile 'phone.

The big question of course is why the five women haven't been fired. And it's one to which Girard says she has no answer.

They've contacted union representatives to find out where they stand legally and have have been told that if they look for and accept jobs elsewhere they'll be considered to have resigned from their current positions, thereby losing eligibility to any redundancy packages that might be coming their way - eventually.

Girard admits the situation could be worse, realising that there probably aren't that many bosses around who would continue to pay salaries to employees for sitting around doing nothing.

All the same she and the other four woman find themselves in employment limbo, knowing that they have no future with the company but just wishing that their employer would take the necessary steps so that they can all move on.

"Sometimes we do a tour of the building just to talk to employees at another company," she says.

"We feel useless and as though we don't really deserves our salaries."

Want to know how much your colleagues earn?

Are you interested in knowing how much other people working alongside you are making without asking them directly or in discovering what your earning potential might be elsewhere?

Well here in France you can - thanks to a site launched at the end of March.

JobFact is the brainchild of its founder Julien Recoing who, according to the French website Rue89, said that its goal was to provide human resources information on two levels - for both employees and companies.

"We started out with the premise that when someone's looking for a job they want to know more about what the company has to offer," he said.

"What we ask is that our members provide a balanced view of the company they work for; the positive and negative aspects."

Where JobFact differs from two other sites in France that have been operational for a year now, Notetonentreprise.com and Cotetaboite.com, is that it allows users to go a step further in "rating" the company they work for - namely by revealing how much they earn.

The principle is simple and as with the other sites its all done "anonymously".

It's free to sign up, which is what you'll have to do if you want to have anything more than a very general overview of what others are earning.

And when you register, you're required either to reveal your salary or leave an evaluation of the company you work for.

The site already has 1,600 members

But as Rue89 points out there's something of an inbuilt contradiction in what the site is setting out to do and the tools it currently has available.

And that is to give reliable information while guaranteeing the anonymity of those providing it; anonymity which makes checking the authenticity of potentially exaggerated claims difficult.

It's something that Recoing says is being addressed with editors able to pinpoint discrepancies that they feel might appear in submissions made.

Perhaps it's an idea that'll catch on, even if openly discussing take-home pay is something of a taboo here in France, where on the whole work colleagues don't talk about how much they earn.

It's not really the "done thing" and smacks of the somewhat vulgar as if mentioning how much you make is tantamount to bragging.

But with figures released on Wednesday by the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (French national institute for Statistics and Economic studies, INSEE) revealing that around 50 per cent of households live on less than €2,260 each month, maybe there'll be fair few out there "interested" in finding out just how their salaries compare with others within their own companies or doing a similar job elsewhere.

Or maybe not.

French prepare to go to the polls

On Wednesday around 19 million French will have the chance to vote.

Oh not another election in France, you may well be screaming.

Sorry folks, afraid so. Following last year's presidential and parliamentary election here, and then the two rounds of local elections in March this year, the French are being called to the ballot box once again.

Around 19 million of them to be precise.

Hang about. You might be wondering how come so few. After all in a country of around 64 million people, surely there are more registered voters than that.

And you would be right in terms of the other national elections, for which there are in fact just over 44 million registered voters.

Furthermore astute France-watchers (oh come on there has to be at least one out there) will have noticed that tomorrow's election falls on a weekday, rather than on a Sunday as is traditional in this country.

Ah, well here's the short answer.

This time around it's a national election for sure, but of quite a different sort - namely for the country's prud'hommes.

If you've just had to reach for the dictionary - here's a simple explanation which will give you (hopefully ) a much clearer understanding of what they do and why they're important.

They're the people who serve on France's 210 private sector joint industrial tribunals.

There are 14,512 elected prud'hommes serving for five years up and down the country on 210 tribunals, and their job is to resolve industrial - or more accurately perhaps, employment - disputes between employer and employee.

Of the 200,000 or so cases the tribunals hear each year, around 50 per cent concern alleged unfair dismissal and compensation claims, with another 40 per cent involving overtime and bonus disputes.

In around 70 per cent of cases, the tribunal rules in favour of the employee.

Wednesday's vote is open to all private sector employees as well as those from state-run commercial companies such as SNCF (railways) and EDF (electricity).

The government has been criticised in the run-up to the election, in particular by Laurence Parisot, the president of MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France or Movement of the French Enterprises).

She's on record as having recently called the government's approach and to the organisation of the vote "a shambles".

Trade unions meanwhile, have been campaigning heavily among private sector employees.

For Bernard Thibault, the general secretary of the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) the largest of France's five main trade unions, Wednesday's vote is also a clear test of government employment policy.

"We want there to be true national consultation and this is a chance to send a clear message to the government as to employees' expectations in this period of (economic) crisis,"he said.

Even though government and trades unions agree that the role of the prud'hommes is a vital one, there has been a marked decrease in participation among those eligible to vote in recent elections. In 1979, turnout was at 63.2 per cent but last time around (2002) only 32.7 per cent voted.

The signs are that Wednesday's vote will be follow a similar pattern with a poll published on Tuesday revealing that 70 per cent of those surveyed saying they would abstain, vote blank or spoil their ballot papers.

"That's the paradox of the prud'hommes," Xavier Bertrand, the minister of employment is reported as saying in the national daily Le Figaro.

"If 90 per cent of those involved in the private sector agree that they (the tribunals) serve a function and are indispensable, only 30 per cent of those eligible actually vote."

France is already working

Forget all those stories you’ve read that the French are apparently a nation of the work shy, spending as little time as possible on the job and instead enjoying more days off than their counterparts in other European countries.

A new study out this week puts paid to that myth and actually reveals what many who live and work in this country probably already knew.

There are a fair number of people who work longer than the official 35-hour week.

So many in fact according to l’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (the national statistics office, l’Insee) that the average working week of Monsieur le Français et Madame la Française is more in the order of 41 hours a week.

The survey was carried out among more than 72,000 people and, described as a so-called snapshot of the job market here in France, reveals some perhaps surprising and significant trends.

While the average working week of the French turned out to be 41 hours, there were of course a number of employment sectors rating far higher.

Farmers top the list, working on average almost 60 hours a week, the self-employed around 55 hours, management (all levels combined) 44 hours and even blue collar workers almost 39 hours.

Of course it rather raises the question as to who, if anyone, is actually benefiting from that 35 hours a week.

The simple answer would appear to be the five million or so “fonctionnaires”, or civil servants, employed in the public services or former state-owned companies that have been partially or fully privatised, but where the same employment protection laws are still very much part of the “way things are done.”

The survey also reveals that unemployment is at 2.2 million, or eight percent of the working population of 27.8 million.

That’s still pretty much well short of the target the government has of five per cent by 2012, but figures can be massaged of course and there are other tendencies revealed by l’Insee, which might help the official level “drop” by then.

For example if the current trend continues, the number of those working on a short-term contract (contrat durée determinée, CDD) is likely to increase and that could have a significant impact on future figures.

Those on CDDs now account for 12 per cent of the working population (up from 11.1 in 2004) and there has also a rise in part-time work.

Those trends also present a somewhat double-edged sword for future unemployment figures. Yes they’ll allow more people to come off the official register, but they also reflect that the French job market is becoming more precarious and that even without government intervention, it’s moving away from the long-established model enjoyed for decades of “jobs for life” in the shape of the contrat durée indeterminée.

So where does this latest report leave the 35-hour working week and the promise of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy promise to shake up the French job market?

After all he’s known to be less than enthusiastic about a policy introduced by a Socialist government just over 10 years ago, which he claims has cost the country billions of euros, created few job opportunities, made French companies less competitive internationally and on whom he blames a fair share of the country’s economic woes

Well first up of course, it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice here how fortuitous the timing of the study is for the government. It comes less than a fortnight after changes in the employment laws were hustled through parliament; changes which will in effect signal the beginning of the end of the 35-hour working week.

In law the 35-hour working week will continue to exist. It needs to so employees can choose between being paid for overtime or taking days off they’ve accumulated.

But Sarkozy’s oft repeated mantra that the French be given the opportunity to “work more to earn more” will also have more credence now that “proof” exists that for the past decade, during which the current legislation has been in operation, many people have in fact been prepared to work much longer hours than the law allows.

It’ll also undoubtedly help in his stated goal of reducing the number of fonctionnaires and weaken the opposition’s claims that there’s no popular sentiment for his proposals.

Perhaps most importantly what the study reveals is that there is already a degree of flexibility in the job market – at least among a high proportion of those in employment, and that the French are more willing to adapt than previously thought.

In other words, France is already working.

A French revolution in labour law as Sarkozy aims to get the country working

This week saw parliamentary approval for a change in France's labour laws and a potential beginning of the end to the country's 35-hour working week.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his ruling centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement UMP) party say the decision will loosen up the country's labour laws and provide a boost to the economy.

Opponents see it as a "step back in time" and a threat to social justice.

At the heart of the reform is the challenge to the France's 35-hour working week.

Many would agree that the original legislation - introduced just over 10 years ago - has had something of a stranglehold on the French labour market ever since.

The original goal of the then Socialist government was to decrease unemployment. But instead the results have been minimal, if not nearly impossible to gauge and, say many economists, cost the country millions of euros.

And while there has been an increase in people taking on second jobs in their free time, critics have claimed that small and medium sized businesses in particular have suffered from the inflexibility of the existing law, and it has made them less competitive.

Employment minister, Xavier Bertrand, one of Sarkozy's closest allies and a possible future prime minister, told national radio that the new law would make the labour market more flexible.

And there's certainly a case to be made for breaking the seeming rigidity of a system where work stops at a given hour regardless of whether a task has been finished - simply because that's the law.

But the new legislation won't actually get rid of the 35-hour-working week altogether, even if that might well be Sarkozy's eventual goal. It'll just allow companies to determine with their employees' consent how long the working week should last (maximum 48 hours) thereby bringing France more into line with its EU partners.

The latest move was probably inevitable as it's all part of Sarkozy's plan to get France back to work.

When asked at a press conference earlier this year whether he wanted to see the end of the 35-hour-working week, Sarkozy took most reporters' breath away by summing up his response in just one word - "yes".

Since then he has backtracked somewhat. In a sense he has had to, simply because his oft-repeated mantra of "work more to earn more" as a means of fulfilling his electoral pledge to increase the purchasing power of the average man and woman on the street, wouldn't function without it.

He still needs the 35-hour working week to be able to allow employers to pay overtime to employees who choose to take it. And he still needs employees to be able to choose between those extra days off they can accumulate or paid overtime. The two go hand in hand.

Sarkozy said as much in a televised inteview a couple of months ago when he admitted that he had not "communicated correctly" the thinking behind his so-called fiscal package. That has since been rectified with a million-euro advertising campaign.

Parliamentary approval is not quite the end of the road for the legislation as far as opponents are concerned.

They say the new law is "dangerous" and claim it increases the likelihood that employees will be forced to work longer hours without being properly paid for them, gives employers an unfair upper hand in allowing them to "dictate the rules" and will lead to an overall reduction in the number of days off.

A group of parliamentarians representing the political Left here in France, along with the Greens intends to challenge the legislation before the country's constitutional court.

For the moment though, Sarkozy finally seems to be delivering on some of the electoral promises he made last year. This latest reform follows hot on the heels of a general overhaul of the French constitution, approved at the beginning of this week.

If he can now be seen to be delivering on the one major area in which he has so far failed - increasing purchasing power - then the economy could well see the kick start it has been waiting for and been promised for over a year now.