From Guy Adams
ON ONE of the smartest streets in central Paris, sandwiched between fashion boutiques, luxury hotels, and a patisserie where half-adozen macaroons cost £25, there is a building with a sign outside reading: ‘ pôle emploi’.
Through its glass doors, you enter an oasis of calm: an air- conditioned atrium filled with purring flat- screen computers, brightly coloured sofas, and a machine offering free tea and coffee.
One thing is missing, though: people. At 11 o’clock on a normal morning, this vast office, spread over an entire ground floor on one of the most bustling streets in France’s capital, a stone’s throw from the Louvre, is almost completely empty.
Over an hour-long period this Wednesday, there were a grand total of four visitors; most left after a couple of minutes. I returned that afternoon, and saw four more cross the threshold, in the course of an hour and a half.
It was eerily, almost surreally quiet; which seemed strange, given that ‘ pôle emploi’ is French for ‘job centre’ and the people of France
‘There is very little incentive
to find a job’ The wealthy have fled to Monaco
and London
face a spiralling unemployment crisis. Monthly figures, out this week, saw a rise in the total number out of work here to over 3.4 million. That equates to an overall rate of 11 per cent, the highest this century. And a quarter of youngsters are now without work.
The situation contributes to an unremittingly grim economic picture, with GDP set to remain flat this year (while Britain’s will grow by 3 per cent) and national debt at a historic high of 115 per cent of GDP, 15 points greater than the UK.
Indeed, France’s failure to recover from the economic crash now imperils the entire Eurozone. It’s also central to an ongoing political crisis which this week led to the resignation of the country’s third government so far this year. On Monday, President Francois Hollande and his Prime Minister Manuel Valls unexpectedly engineered the departure of his far-Left economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg, along with two other front-benchers.
They had publicly opposed his efforts to kick- start the economy by curbing some excesses of its bloated public sector and curtailing Byzantine labour laws that have helped international investment in France halve in the past two years.
But this attempted show of strength simply led to the entire government collapsing, and did little to bolster the bumbling image of Hollande, who is widely nicknamed ‘ Monsieur Flanby’, after a wobbly caramel pudding.
He swept into power in 2012 as an oldfashioned socialist, promising to look after the working man, increase income tax to 75 per cent for high earners, and make ‘ big finance’ his enemy.
Intriguingly, Ed Miliband promptly declared Hollande an inspiration who ‘has shown that the Centre Left can offer hope and win elections with a vision of a better, more equal and more just world’.
Doubtless the Labour leader felt he had much in common with this new president.
Neither man has ever held down a serious job outside politics. Both subscribe to traditional Left-wing economic principles. And, despite his much publicised recent liaisons with a lissom film star, Hollande shares Miliband’s physical awkwardness.
Yet the high taxes, low growth and general economic drift that have resulted from Hollande’s policies have lately made him rather less of a role model.
Today, his approval ratings are just 17 per cent, the lowest since records began.
Yet much as France may revile its President, the country shows no signs of facing the harsh realities which may solve its economic crisis.
For as that expensive, publicly funded — and empty — job centre in the Rue St Croix de la Bretonnerie suggests, France is displaying little urgency about getting back to work.
Visit Paris, and you’ll see signs of decline everywhere: in boarded-up shops in the Rue de Rivoli, the capital’s equivalent of London’s Oxford Street, in rough- sleepers clogging parks and underpasses, beggars at every cashpoint, and gangs of Roma children who throng the Eiffel Tower, Champs-Elysees and Notre Dame, stealing from tourists.
Across the country, things are similarly moribund.
In the industrial north, factories are closing at a rate that prompted Parliament to pass a law in February to fine companies that shut them down too quickly.
On the Mediterranean coast, where France traditionally spends August, the Riviera Times newspaper complained this week that visitor numbers are down, and the few tourists there can no longer splash out in bars.
House prices are falling 2 per cent annually, consumer spending is down, and almost 10 per cent of people are classed as ‘ long-term’ unemployed, out of work for more than two years.
Yet the great paradox of Hollande’s France is that its enormous welfare state — public spending now accounts for 57 per cent of the entire economy against 44 per cent for the UK — makes the lifestyle of its 3.4 million unemployed very comfortable indeed.
A worker who loses a job can, for example, expect to be immediately paid between two-thirds and threequarters of their former salary by the government, for at least a year and often two.
Thereafter they are given a raft of other benefits, including free housing and use of public transport. Their circumstances barely change after being laid off. Even those actively seeking work display a strange degree of ambivalence. Take, for example, 41-year-old Emma Durand, who lost her job in Paris as a senior communications consultant last year.
She’s being paid ‘around 60 per cent’ of the € 34,000 [£ 27,000] she earned in her final year. With benefits, and the fact she now pays no tax, she says her take- home income is much the same as her final salary. ‘There is very little incentive to return to work, even if jobs were available,’ she admitted.
A recently jobless academic, Giles Simon, explained that his council rent was now paid, and he ‘ lives pretty comfortably’ on the equivalent of around £400 a week.
‘If you know how to get the best out of the system, it is a very generous one,’ said Simon, 34.
Both Simon and Durand had (as law requires) contributed 2.4 per cent of their earnings, while working, towards a government insurance programme that funds unemployment payments.
It is one of dozens of ‘social charges’ deducted from the salary of French workers, which typically reduce take- home pay by around a third, even before income tax.
The expensive and hugely bureaucratic system has, in fairness to Hollande, built up over decades. It’s administered by France’s vast army of ‘ fonctionnaires,’ or civil servants, who are an astonishing 5.2 million in number (up by more than a third since the 1980s) and now represent 22 per cent of the country’s entire active workforce.
A recent book by French tax expert Jean-Phillipe Delsol, entitled Why I’m Going To Leave France, pointed out that this figure compared to an average for developed countries of 15 per cent.
Quite what these people do all day is anyone’s guess. But they aren’t exactly oiling France’s economic wheels. Indeed, French businessmen all complain about burdensome regulation.
‘In France, we have a saying which goes “Quand le batiment va, tout va” (when the building industry is going well, everything is going well),’ says Joseph Couedic, a trader who spoke to the Mail in the seaside town of St Gildas de Rhuys in Brittany.
‘But there are now no fewer than 4,000 regulations which have to be followed in France when you build a house. In Switzerland there are 170. Imagine the bureaucracy!’
A few years ago, particularly harsh light was shed on ‘ fonctionnaires’ by Aurélie Boullet, a university graduate who spent two years working for Aquitaine Regional Council.
Boullet revealed how her average workload amounted to between five and 12 hours a month. The 30 staff in her office spent their life browsing Facebook, planning holidays, and taking long lunch breaks, she claimed.
Boullet told how on one occasion she was reprimanded by her boss for typing a report in the wrong font. He gave her an entire week to solve the problem. It took 25 seconds.
Like all government workers, ‘ fonctionnaires’ enjoy six weeks of paid holiday a year, and cannot be made to work for more than 35 hours