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![]() Just Above Sunset
July 10, 2005 - Immoral, Anti-American, or Just Too French?
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Some topics never seem
to die. And how strange the French are is one of them. There is a huge debate roiling in Europe today over which economic model to follow: the Franco-German
shorter-workweek-six-weeks'-vacation-never-fire-anyone-but-high-unemployment social model or the less protected but more innovative,
high-employment Anglo-Saxon model preferred by Britain, Ireland and Eastern Europe. It is obvious to me that the Irish-British
model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland
or they become museums. That is their real choice over the next few years - it's either the leprechaun way or the Louvre.
Say what? His contention is that the German and French political systems will experience massive shocks soon as both
these nations are asked to work harder and embrace either more outsourcing, or more young Muslim and Eastern European immigrants,
to remain competitive. He says the "French may want to take a few tips from the
Celtic Tiger." Ireland, it seems, instituted
new laws that make it easier to fire people, and without having to pay any severance.
He likes that. Why? Because
"the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people." The key trope of Tom Friedman's columns throughout his European vacation has been that France
is poor, and we need to ask why France is so poor, and draw important policy conclusions from this. But is France poor?
No difference? It would seem for the work done, the results are the same. ... France has fewer workers, working shorter weeks, and taking longer vacations - that
is why they make less money. Per hour of output, France is generating much more value than America is. If your
buddy made 50 percent more than you because he was working 50 percent longer and had four weeks less vacation than you did,
it certainly wouldn't be obvious that your buddy had a better job than you do. Similarly, while it's clear that the French
have less stuff than we do, they have more leisure time, and it's not obvious that our situation is better. Indeed, it's not
clear what "better" would even mean in this context. Yep, slackers. (Note that if you go to the Yglesias item he links to the source of all his data - so he's not making stuff
up.) Matt Yglesias points out today that although French GDP per capita is considerably lower than
America's, it's mostly because they have "fewer workers, working shorter weeks, and taking longer vacations." Higher unemployment
is also a factor, but basically Matt is right: the French have simply chosen to work less and have more leisure than Americans
do. Maybe so. But it's a question of values. There we note, or at least
imply, that there are people who would go insane - they would lose their grasp of who they are at the core - if they had do
define themselves by something other than the work they do and their career.
And there are a few Americans who often think their jobs will drive them insane, because that's is not
who there are - there's more to life, and to who they are. Yes, these are the
cheese-eating surrender-monkeys who walk amongst us, even now. Tom Friedman is right. France is a real hellhole. Ask anyone who spends any time there. Like Richard
Perle, neocon France-hater. Digby seems to be one of
those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys who walk amongst us. The citizens of France are once again taking a pasting on the op-ed pages. Their failing this
time is not that they are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as they were thought to be during the invasion of Iraq, but rather
that they voted to reject the new European Union constitution. According to the pundits, this was the timid, shortsighted
choice of a backward-looking people afraid to face the globalized future. But another way of looking at it is that the French
were simply trying to hold on to their perks - their cradle-to-grave welfare state and, above all, their cherished 35-hour
workweek. Now there's an idea! The rest are presumably sitting in the café, fretting over the Turks, Bulgarians and Romanians,
who, if they were admitted to the European Union, would come flooding over the French border and work day and night for next
to nothing. Well, that didn't work
out, and McGrath concedes economic globalization obviously has a great deal to do with the change. Yeah, the world got flat. The notion of a regular workweek was a late-18th-century invention, a product of the vastly speeded-up
pace of the Industrial Revolution, which instead of liberating workers, virtually enslaved them, dooming entire families to
numbing stretches in what Blake called the "dark, Satanic mills." The Mills and Factories Act, passed in England in 1833 to
curb the worst labor abuses of the time, limited children 9 and older to 48 hours of work a week and teenagers to 69 hours.
Adults worked even longer, and they did so in part simply because they could. The rat race is nothing
new. Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote (2005), "Work and Leisure in the U.S. and
Europe: Why So Different?" (Cambridge: Harvard University). There you go. Someone suggested "work less, work all" and the fools adopted the suggestion, and people got free time
and long vacations. We didn't go that way. As I'm sure my dear fellow-countryman Drum realizes, the vast majority of Americans don't have
this choice. We educated professionals have a lot of freedom to structure our time how we wish. But how many American Wal-Mart
employees could go to their boss and say: "Jeez, I'd like to spend more time with my kids. Can I take all of August off and
give up the wage?" The answer is: "Sure, in some other job. I'll give you a friendly incentive to find one in two words: you're
fired!" It seems this guy was never
a real workaholic American, though he claims he once worked for four years in American without ever taking a substantial vacation. Well, as most employers here might say, that's a start. Don't brag to other people about how hard you work. If you go up to someone in Europe and say "I work 10 hours a day, six days a week, 51 weeks a year. Look how much
I achieve!" you'll get the same reaction you would in America if you said "I wash my hands exactly 169 times a day.
Look how clean they are! Look! Look!!!" Ah yes, there is a gap
in what is understood to be of real worth in this world. Obsessive work. Obsessive cleanliness. Whatever. I've had more than a few years of lectures on how the French know absolutely nothing about business
and even less about personal responsibility, on how there are really no successful French businesses except by accident, how
the French don't know how to really work, how they don't take work and career and career advancement seriously. Those long
lunches, four-week vacations and the thirty-five hour workweek amaze him. And there's usually a bit on how the socialized
medical system over there is evil and destroys initiative and so on and so forth. More than three years later
there's an answer to that from this fellow in Germany - about how to get with the sense of what is important over there -
... enjoy your free time! Pay attention to the people
you are with, and you'll notice that they do things with their free time. They
spend lots of time with their friends and family, they pursue hobbies much more complex than catching up on all the episodes
of Sex & the City, they visit museums, read complex books, drink a whole lot, go to parties, fairs, and circuses,
and take lots of vacations. Imitate them.
And then decide whether you'd really give that all up to make $5,000 more a year.
If the answer is still "gimme the $5,000," move back to the U.S. Well, my friend enjoyed
himself, but came back. Everyone has his or her priorities. I'm leaving Washington tomorrow evening, for a five-week vacation across the Atlantic. And he explains. Click on the link for that. Do the American people really want this situation? Do they really believe that overworking is
a good way to achieve the highest "standard of living" in the world? Do they really think that GDP per capita is the best
measure of well-being? I'm not sure. But it would be difficult to even get a debate over the question started in this country.
The ethic of work seems too strong, too rooted in American culture to be publicly challenged. And the globalization of economy
is not helping: Americans today feel that they have to work "35 hours per day" for remaining the leading country in the world. Yeah, but what if we suddenly
decided we don't want to be the leading country in the world and just want to live better? |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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