Down and Out: The French Flee a Nation in Despair
Word to the wise:
“How stupid do you think we are? I have visited the factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only 3 hours a day. They told me that’s the French Way.”
(Maurice Taylor, President of Titan International in a leaked letter to the French Minister who was imploring Taylor not to close a Goodyear Tire plant in France) – continue reading HERE
Unionized.
So the other 5 hours of the work day are spent on ‘champagne break’…
Salute
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
All the current “financial crises” are in fact, government financial crises. Economies the world over cannot afford their parasitical governments.
When the 35-hour work week was introduced in France, a friend of mine in the French Army told me a joke that was making the rounds in the barracks:
Q: Why are all the civil servants pissed off with the new 35-hour work week?
A: They don’t think it’s fair they have to work an extra five hours.
Then there’s them long holidays…….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country
Done business in France and the U.S.A. and discovered France was the original U.S.A. Automotive Assembly manufacturing culture. However in France the culture extended to most manufacturing entities.
We are all aware of what happened to the American/Canadian automotive assembly plants. Is it still happening? Has anyone heard about the Obama care exemptions?
Cheers;
I noticed that the United States has none!! 0 zip zilch nada!, I guess it is depending on the company ,not the govornment !!
There’s a reason for that. France has a very high proportion of state corporations compared to Britain, US, Germany, Canada. And for the past 30-50 years, it was a recurring pattern that at various times some of them would get into serious financial difficulties. Rather than let them collapse, the French government would orchestrate mergers between an ailing state company and a healthy one, regardless of whether or not their business activities were in any way complementary.
The result has been to saddle formerly reasonably healthy state corporations with the excessive losses and debt of the sick entity. As part of the package, the French government would absorb some of the corporate debt on the state books, and the whole system would continue to limp along. A recent example is when the French government tried to make EdF take on the company that manufactures TGV. The response of the EdF board (this was about 2006 or so) was that they would sell it to Siemens.
Sell France’s technological rail marvel to the heathen Boche? Unthinkable! So for one of the very few times, the French government was forced to bail it out directly. Well these sorts of ownership shell games are just about done. There’s no healthy entities around to bail out the sick ones any more. And they can’t fix themselves thanks to public sector unions and poisonously low wrench times.
Hollande’s election two years ago may just turn out to be as disastrous for France as the Leon Blum election in 1936. The hard left in France is completely bankrupt of ideas as to how to extract France from its dilemma. And so, Hollande staggers on, announcing a new tax every 10 days or so. The country will be in very serious difficulties indeed if there’s ever a major bank failure requiring the government to backstop depositor losses. But we’ve already seen how that works in the case of Cyprus. Given Hollande’s recent history with taxation, it’s all too possible for an outright levy on depositors over some nominal amount in the event of a bank crash.
This is not a new story, but the State keeps chugging along. We need new tools to measure sustainability because the old ones don’t work for a socialized nation.
France should really have become part of Germany after WWII. They have ways to make the lazy work; those are the ones that don’t give a squat.
This is the first example in history where Socialism failed. And surprise, it’s the French.
Pick up a copy of The Benefits of Socialism, available at socialistbenefits.org. And get educated.
France is the epitome of Eurabia, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of socialist idiots.
Terrible class system still in France and England. In France if you haven’t gone to the right school, you won’t be part of the elite. I will say until recently the school system was first rate and everyone can speak and write well, unlike the Quebec French graduates.
Gee, is Something Bad happening to the French?
How terrible! Let me see if I can work up a tear for the poor oppressed French workers.
…
Nope, nothing. They are getting what they voted for since 1945. Good and hard.
Correction: 1940 not 1945.
Thanks cgh. Good information and interesting speculation. Cheers;
In related news . . .
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/03/going-galt-in-france-and-a-message-for-america-expect-a-brain-drain-and-capital-flight-when-the-welfare-state-explodes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FmmMP+%28CARPE+DIEM%29
“In France if you haven’t gone to the right school, you won’t be part of the elite.”
Unlike anywhere else of course.
Hardly the first such case. Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried, or hadn’t you noticed a little prior event called the fall of the Soviet Union?
It’s lasted longer in France because it was a much richer country and took a lot longer for the socialists to loot.
the rich and the young have been fleeing France, which suffers from a “toxic Marxist heritage” and has become an unsustainable addictive welfare state that is killing jobs and economic opportunity
‘Going Galt’ is happening all over the world as successful people turn their backs to socialist idiocy. Yup, even her in Canada more of us are becoming increasingly selective with what jobs we’ll accept and whose contracts we’ll take. The hassle of dealing with inept bureaucracies and moving finish lines simply makes the money not worth it. Making less money with good clients is far more rewarding.
Having recently visited France for several weeks, it struck me how messed up their economic system is. One of the revelations that blew me away was how incredibly difficult/impossible it is to fire anyone, even if you’re just a tiny Mom & Pop operation. I asked several business savvy people how such laws protecting incompetent people could be allowed to persist, especially given France’s high unemployment rate. They just shook their heads in exasperation but had no answers.
Sorry, having problems to find a reason to feel sorry for them.
http://www.giveafuckometer.com/
Let us see now.
By now most if not all informed people must know by empirical evidence that socialism failed every time it was tried.
What is it then with the useless people that went to school for a long time that they think they got the fix to make it better?
There are certain parallels along the French president and the recently deceased president of Venezuela.
They both don’t and did not like the rich. That they both made themselves rich by proclaiming the sentiment, that may be an indication that they don’t really mean and meant it, though it serves their virtually unfathomable purpose.
Both of them tax those that have money by virtue of work and give it to those for whom work is mostly a foreign concept. Probably because they have grown up getting most everything for free.
Many, many years ago in very early 60’ties of the past century, in a socialist country run by communists, there were visitors from France in town. This being a somewhat exotic event, since there were very few visitors from the west side of Europe. There was a French speaking person in local crowd and people would ask the French speaker to ask different questions.
One asked if everybody pays the same price for an automobile. The answer was that no, it depended on how much one makes, how many children there were in the family and such.
Thinking later, it did not seem right, maybe the French just wanted to make the locals more comfortable with the socialistas, communistas.
It is interesting to note, that the socialist schemes are set up to degrade people. Is it not an idiotic statement for a president not less, to say he does not like the rich. Or is it to cover his ass in a scheme to get himself into the sphere of rich.
Why would it be business of anybody to say how much someone else should have.
If you think about it, it could make your head spin.
On the other hand it has no effect on the masses since they have others to think for them.
At the moment a staggering 84 percent of the leaders of the top 40 companies in France hail from just three places – HEC, ENA, and Polytechnique.
Selection-by-elimination is at the heart of a French education system put in place by Napoleon in the early 19th century, and that begins as early as secondary school, in a country where 95 percent of college students go to second-tier public universities. and where the dropout rate can be as high as 85 percent (for first year medical students, for example).
Then there are the happy few, the 5 percent who attend the Grandes écoles like Sciences Po. These include the national administration school, ENA, and the Ecole Polytechnique, which together produce a mere 0.057 percent of French graduates but nonetheless make up more than 60 percent of President François Hollande’s staff.
Hollande attended not one but three Grandes écoles: Sciences-Po, ENA, and the business school HEC. His predecessor, on the other hand, got a lowly law degree from a public university, which prompted one critic, to snipe “Sarkozy doesn’t know how to talk to the state.”
I hope that everyone reads all the way to the end of the article:
““This should be a warning to other countries, like Britain – it’s all very well punishing a conservative politician you’re dissatisfied with by voting for a maverick, Le Pen here, Farage there. But it gets the likes of Hollande elected. Think well: is ours the kind of future you want for your country?”
We have just under a year and a half to get over ourselves, help to renew the only party that can preserve the admittedly limited gains that have been achieved over the past 8 years, and prepare for what will be a bitterly fought but crucially important election.
France
87 tax increases in the last 2 years
40% of 2014 University graduates want to emigrate
80% of 2014 University graduates in fields that lead to jobs want to emigrate
Socialism works???
Well, if there is one thing the French are good at it’s fleeing
JJM – the point is the ENArcs occupy the pinnacle of French life, and French society looks up to them as natural rulers in a way the people in Englsh speaking countries have never looked up to the ruling class in their countries. In general, bureaucrats are despised in English speaking countries, and the expression ” the law is an ass ” is a commonplace in them.
Of course, the ruling class is as self-regarding and absurd in English speaking countries as they are in France, no question.
Yeah, right. The Krauts have this work ethic motto “Arbeit macht frei” meaning “work makes you free “.