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November 6, 2005

Structural Failure

So the Opinionated Wife and I were discussing the riots in France. A few years ago she had a friend who lived in France for awhile who married a Frenchman and moved back to America. Since the Blogosphere is starting to realize that this riots had little to do with Muslims, and more to do with fundamental problems in the structure of French society, I’ll offer up a point she made.

Underemployment. France enforces that the employer provide a number of benefits to employees after a year of employment. The vaunted shorter work week and month long vacation in the summer for instance. This has produced the unintended consequence that if you’re young and unestablished, your jobs last 10-11 months; after which you need to get a new job. Evedentially, the benefits are so onourus that French companies have instituionalized a cycle of hiring and firing.

So young French people are forced to have multiple jobs so that they can survive when one job lets them go to avoid the governmental restrictions. This makes it very difficult for young people to establish themselves, because in essence they must have two employers at all times for 20-30 hours a week each; then every 5 months they have to look for another job to replace one of those jobs.

Is your work week really shorter if it consists of 2 20-30 hour per week jobs? That sounds like 40-60 hours a week to me.

This is interesting because when I was in Germany a few years ago I was talking to one of the young Germans. If he wanted to work overtime, he had to go to the labor board and get permission each time. The end result was that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Instead, he moonlighted as a bouncer in a local nightclub instead. He bypassed the labor board by being paid in cash under the table.

I don’t think it should be a surprise to anyone that France and Germany have dismal economies. The more I here about their countries, the more they remind me of Atlas Shrugged.

My wife’s friend loved France, but moved back to America because despite all their social programs, it was finanically impossible for her to finance her education, and therebe advance herself.

Posted by the at November 6, 2005 1:51 PM

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