A manager with France’s national railway company SNCF who has been paid €60,000 a year, to stay at home and do “nothing” for the past 12 years has sued the firm for €500,000 in lost earnings. Charles Simon, 55, says he was shunted “into a cupboard” – put on indefinite paid gardening leave – after telling his bosses about a €20m accounting fraud at an SNCF subsidiary in 2003. He says he has several times asked for another role, but nothing has been forthcoming – except for a monthly pay cheque. He is suing for compensation on the grounds that his career has been held back and he could have earned far more. The bizarre case highlighs the difficulties facing the over-staffed railway, whose employees are said to be all but immune from dismissal. The same goes throughout French industry.
My nephew has been working in Paris with a mixed team of French and British workers. He reports that the work ethic is scimpy, to say the least. A delivery arrives ten minutes before work officially ends. The Brits pile on and get the truck unloaded and the goods checked in; the French have disappeared. A phone call comes in during lunchtime, and the French telephonist refuses to pick up the receiver. Little things, But typical events in a French working day. Small wonder that France is in a sad economic fix.
When I took over my old company I found the same attitude, and had to tell the staff, many of whom were a good deal older than myself, that either they looked after the customerd, promptly and cheerfully, or they could clock-watch somewhere else. It did work. They turned out to be great, when they grasped the idea.
On the other hand, I do have this love affair with the French way of life ……….the climate, the food, the countryside, the general attitude to life, even the lack of logic. I am no capitalist, but even I agree that you can’t run a successful economy (or company) with a part-time attitude.
Part of the reason why people don’t work especially hard in France is because the nation is in despair. There is a feeling that what once was a proud and influential country, is now only a shadow of its former self. French is no longer the language of diplomats the way it once was. French manufacturing has all but disappeared, destroyed by globalisation and the outsourcing of jobs. The EU and the Euro were meant to offer unprecedented prosperity, but they have delivered anything but. To top it all off, you have EU bureaucrats and far left activists deriding patriotism as an irrational and backward concept, and demanding an ever closer union, at the expense of national sovereignty.
It’s been all too easy to blame this on the recent wave of North African Muslim immigrants, whose culture and values are very different from French people. But its economic globalisation, not immigrants, that are to blame for France’s problems. What is needed is a party that will unite the whole country and get the economy going again. But that is easier said than done.
Excellent post, Owen. If you go to France, at the slightest opportunity, French people will give you a speech saying how awful everything is. London now has I don’t know how many French people. They seem to be the largest minority of all, although I don’t have figures to back that up. Much as we bemoan the state of Britain it seems to be a magnate to the French in particular.
Poor Descartes! He must lament the lack of logic in his native land. Amazing that you had to explain to your employees the value of: “look to the customers promptly” and even, gasp! “cheerfully.” Wouldn’t you think that that was obvious? On the other hand, look at the wretched customer services at most of this country’s major corporations.