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Frog BLOG » Business
“how about 50 reasons to love the French ?
it's this 'je ne sais quoi' that has the world attention,is it their forward fashion style ? merci Coco Chanel...is it their fine cuisine ?...crême brûlée anyone? or is it Edith Piaf singing 'la vie en rose'....well the list is endless really ! just thought I'd post a little bit of 'frog-ism'...à bientôt.”
“Friends of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30-hour week.
Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.
One colleague said: "He was, how you say, un workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.
But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my beret and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier. I remembered he had been working for almost six hours."
Last night a spokesman for Soc Gen said that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being arrogant.”
“Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.
To make matters worse, the elaborate French welfare state - government spending accounts for roughly half of GDP compared with 36% in the U.S. - also forces high tax burdens on younger workers lucky enough to have a job, largely to pay for an escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. In this system, the incentives are to take it easy, live well and then retire. The bloat of privileged aging blocks out opportunity for the young.”
In my experience, the French can be most dilligent in business.
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During the 1990s, a large and expensive engineering project we had undertaken in Northern France was damaged in an unavoidable accident, to the tune of over a million quid. We discovered the French manager of the project had been carefully observing the bottom line, and had saved us the expense of insurance premiums.
So very pleased.”
“I used to work for a small UK company that decided to expand into France. So we took on a nice French lady to head up a Paris office. On her first day, she phoned in sick. After a few weeks of her claiming unspecific maladies, without ever actually having come into the office, we started to try and get rid of her. It was then that the full horror of French employment law became apparent. Three months later, we had to pay her a largish sum to persuade her to resign, without her ever having showed up for work.
The small UK company is now defunct. Funny, that…”
“Business in France, its a bloody joke. A 2 hour lunch break over there, just about paralyses a working day. Why 2 hours? Probably because the waiters are so darn slow…”
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