A few months ago a friend of mine returned from his first trip overseas. Like most first time travellers, the trip made a big impression on him. He was particularly impressed with the French, and what he saw of Parisian life.
Two hour lunches! Six week holidays! The French work to live, with us North Americans live to work!
Seeing as how many of my peers are currently working 15 hour days on Bay Street, the appeal of long lunches on the Riviera wasn’t lost on me. So why do we do we work how we work, and they work how they work? Is it just a cultural thing? Are us North Americans masochists? While not raised protestant myself, it’s pretty clear that some of that protestant work ethic has been so deeply ingrained in our culture that it seeps through all of us like osmosis. To take more than a couple weeks of vacation seems indulgent, and taking a lunch of more than an hour is putting your job at risk. But the differences between the culture of working in France and North America go much deeper than a vacation here, or a couple extra sips of the latte during your lunch break there. For proof of that, you just need to know the story of Aurelie Boullet.
You know those scratch lottery tickets that pay you a thousand bucks for the rest of your life? That’s basically what happened when Ms. Boullet landed a job two years ago in France’s vast bureaucracy. While in North America everyone strives to become a doctor or a lawyer, in France, to become a mid-level bureaucrat is the realization of the French dream, and the peak of working life. Why? Well, listen to some of the perks.
Installed in the Aquitaine Regional Council in southwest France, she was quickly told that her actual work amounted to between five and 12 hours a month, writing bland summaries of existing reports and helping councillors book first-class travel to destinations in Asia that had little or no relation to their business.
One morning, she was brought into her supervisor’s office and told that she had produced a report in the wrong typeface. She was given a full week, without any other tasks, to solve this problem. The job took her about 25 seconds.
Most of her time at that job was to be filled with breaks, work-avoidance dodges, entire afternoons on Facebook and months of vacation. None of the 30 staff in her office seemed to have any real job; some were friends of councillors who were hired on lucrative contracts with the title chef de mission and no actual function.
Boullet was eventually fired for starting a blog, revealing the dirty inner workings of the French bureaucracy. While people asked her why put her cushy job at risk, she responded that she felt a national responsibility. No culture can survive supporting a culture of free loaders. The strains are already beginning to show as the French deficit has begun to sky-rocket. Of course, one has to ask how the French got away with this for so long. France remains a prosperous nation, and despite a stagnant workforce, enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Well, there are two answers for that; one, while the French economy may be internally stagnant, private French corporations are hugely profitable, bringing in money from all over the world. Unfortunately, a lot of these companies aren’t known for being the most ethical. French water companies for example have been notorious for making shady deals with third world countries in order to privatize their water supplies, drawing huge profits from poor indigenous populations. It had gotten so bad that even rain water collected on public lands were considered private assets owned by the huge French multinationals. In other words, France has been able to live off their corporate colonialism.
Second, even within France most of the hard labour that needs to be done is done by underpaid and overworked minorities. Over the past decade, civil unrest in suburban areas outside Paris have been flaring with frequent regularity, home to where most of these visible minorities live. Most of the unrest results from the poor working conditions, and the dearth of opportunities for upward mobility presented to the French minority working class. It’s no wonder that the French middle class can live so comfortably; they have slaves doing all the work for them.
So while we would like to believe that the luxury of the French lifestyle comes at no cost, that too, like those early Jacques Tati films depicting glorious, lazy lunches along the Riviera, are pure fiction. Working fifteen hour days may not be glamorous, but at least it’s honest.
