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.

"Leave me alone," says Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Ah. We've all missed him, haven't we?

Who?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn of course.

Since his alleged "philandering" (to put in mildly) in that infamous Sofitel suite in New York back in May 2011, the former head of the International Monetary Fund has only given one interview.

That was with the clearly uncomfortable TF1 news anchor Claire Chazal in September last year when DSK gave a table-thumping performance while brandishing a document "proving" his innocence but also having the temerity to admit he had made a "moral error" - whatever that was supposed to mean.



Since then of course there have been further accusations, such as those of writer and journalist Tristane Banon and investigations into his involvement in hotel sex parties with prostitutes in the northern city of Lille.

His long-suffering and very deep-pocketed wife Anne Sinclair has flown the coop, and the man to whom France must be eternally grateful for the arrival of the gormlessly presidential normal one in office (François Hollande, in case you were wondering), has kept as low a profile as possible given the circumstances.

But now the man the French "affectionately" (really?) refer to as DSK is back - sort of - with an exclusive and all-revealing five-page interview in the weekly news magazine Le Point.

Actually it's not - revealing that is.

Much of what DSK actually tells the magazine has been heard or said before with the exception perhaps that, in almost Greta Garbo-style, DSK launches a plea for the media to leave him alone.

Reach for your handkerchieves everyone as you read the following (paraphrased) extract.

"I no longer play any sort of official public role. I'm not a candidate for anything and I have never been convicted either in this country or any other," he tells Le Point.

"Therefore there's really no reason why the media should be so interested in me and to such an extent it has become almost like a manhunt," he continues, disingenuously to say the least.

"I can no longer stand the fact that the media seems to have given itself the 'right' to violate my privacy in the way it has, just because there have been false allegations made against me and judicial investigations launched.

"I just want to be left alone!"

And yadda yadda yadda.

DSK is probably not the only one - that wishes he would be left alone, that is.

The less coverage, the better.

But just in case you can't get enough and want a great pre-bedtime read with your Horlicks, rush out now to the newsagents to secure your copy of this week's Le Point.

Debunking Jean-Francois Copé's Ramadan pain au chocolat tale

The campaign for the presidency of the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) has taken a decided turn to the right in recent days.

At least for one of the candidates still left in the race, Jean-Francois Copé, the party's current secretary general.

If he runs out the winner against former prime minister François Fillon in November, the chances are the UMP will be able to drop any pretence of being a centre-right one.

The signs are there.

First up there's his aptly entitled "Manifesto pour une droite décomplexée", extracts of which you can read in Le Figaro and which illustrate how Copé believes there's an "anti-white discrimination" in some areas of France.

And presumably that so-called discrimination can be found, if you follow Copé's line of thinking, in the very same areas as the ones quoted in a campaign speech he gave last Friday in the southeastern town of Draguignan.

Jean--François Copé in Draguignan (screenshot from i>Télé report)

Apart from banging on about the current government's mishandling of the country which is, after all, what a party in opposition is supposed to do, Copé also revealed a little more of what we might expect from the UMP with him at the head.


You see, apparently he can "understand the exasperation of some people who return home from work in the evening to learn that their son has had his pain au chocolate taken from him, just as he was leaving school, by thugs who explained to him that Ramadan means fasting."

Take a listen to the clip.



Right. Yes definitely an "uninhibited Right" and not a direction some other leading UMP figures  would share, as former finance minister François Baroin was clear to point out at the weekend.

Quite apart from the offensive and inflammatory nature of Copé's remark with its obvious undertones which surely don't need to be spellt out (but have been nonetheless by many over the past couple of days in what the French almost lovingly refer to as a "polemic") there's also an essential problem with his little anecdote.

Timing.

When was the example quoted by Copé as leading to his enlightened understanding of some parents' annoyance supposed to have taken place exactly?

2012? Impossible as many have since pointed out because Ramadan fell during the school holidays

2011? Equally unfeasible for exactly the same reason.

So that leaves the most recent possible date for such a  act 2010
So in other words, poor old Copé has been waiting two whole years to bring the plight of that child to the public's attention and to show just how in tune he is with the thinking of M. et Madame Average French citizen?

Yes M. Copé, let the French eat their pain au chocolat.