I’m just curious if the French student protests that have been going on recently are simply against a system that is more like the system in the US where an employer has the right to fire the employee much more easily?
If so, wouldn’t that help France increase it’s productivity? I was reading an article in Le Monde recently that said all of France’s top twenty five companies have been around since the 1960’s where as only six of America’s top companies have been around for as long. France has no Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.
So, would this new “précarité” with CPE (Contrat Premiere Embauche) help France become more competitive?
Just curious…
Perhaps, but not everyone sees trading security and quality of life for productivity to be that great a trade.
What even sven said - Europeans as a whole don’t place quite as much of an emphasis on monetary gain. And in comparison to the ‘no Google…’ comment, France is home to a few small companies you might have heard of, such as Airbus.
Perhaps I should clarify. You see, I actually love the typically “European” view as pertains to the relationship between work and relaxation.
Living in Paris, I often get the impression, though, that the French want to ignore the fact that globalization has changed the rules of the game. You can’t promise that you’ll keep most of your factories in France, or your companies will be less competative, then your economy will worsen, etc.
I’m not an economist, and I’m not French. These are just the things I read in the news and hear from professors.
So, whether or not European individuals are concerned about their monetary gain, they, I’m fairly certain, are concerned about their economy’s ability to compete, right?
I should hope that France doesn’t lose it’s sense of work-to-relax attitude for the American, as it often appears to me, work-for-work attitude.
Like I said, I’m not an economist. I’m just a philosophy student. That’s why I ask these things.
Which, uh, dates from the late '60s (although not officially incorporated until 1970). Which means that it has no bearing on the point that France’s big companies all pretty much date from the 1960s…or am I missing something?
I disagree with even sven’s point about Europe. The French would like more productivity, employment, etc - or at least, the people without jobs would. The main problem is that they have been trying to eat their cake and have it, too, and that’s led to regulations that lower incentives for many companies to take on more people or innovate to as great an extent as in other states. Germany had (has) the same problem and are beginning to take steps to make the labor market more flexible. While I don’t think the western European countries want to go as far as we have in the US, they will move much further in that direction in the coming years than they do now.