When my French friend, Guillaume Baguette VIII, asked me if
I knew how the unemployment worked in France, my initial thought was “ya, you
ask the government for money and they give you barely enough to survive off
of”. But in a socialist country, you can never just assume: there’s always more
to the story i.e. more ways to cheat the system. Essentially, Guillaume had
just finished his summer job, working for 2 months at a beachside restaurant.
The obvious upside is that he spent the summer at the beach, the preferred
dwelling of most any sane college kid. The downside is that he was obliged to
work 7 days, 60 hours a week during this period. You might wonder how this is
possible in a country like France, where most companies are restricted to the
35-hour law and must otherwise fetch out a fortune in overtime pay. You are
correct to assume that these long hours don’t go unrewarded. Special
circumstances arise when your employer, who has only been reporting the legal
hourly limit, terminates* (key word) your indefinite* (other key word) contract
and qualifies you for unemployment insurance over the next six months to assist
you while you “look for” a new job. Luckily for Monsieur Bagette VIII, he met
the standard 250 hours of annual work during his 2 months of waiting, which
qualifies him for extra special treatment. The government subsequently writes
him checks for 70% of his previous salary or, in my friend’s case, 1400 euro,
which so happens to also be the minimum wage in France.
My friend is a student
at a music school, where he attends 5 hours of class a week (another special
program) at basically zero cost, leaving him with however much time he pleases
to rehearse with his band, go out on the town, really a few options.
Considering the circumstances from an American perspective, it might not seem
logical that an unemployed part-time student would be able to afford a first
floor apartment to himself in the city center of a major metropolitan area. But
the government helps with this as well. Being a student in France qualifies you
for subsided housing that brings his monthly housing cost down 70% to just under
200 euro a month. I asked my friend what he plans to do all this extra money
that the government has is throwing at him. A three-week trip to Thailand over the
Christmas holidays assures me that his heads in the right place. Perhaps the
best thing of all, when next summer rolls around, he’ll have the opportunity to
retake up his waiter gig, reenroll in another bogus part-time school and the cycle
repeats. And at the moment, that’s exactly what he plans to do.
Not
surprisingly, he’s not the only one to take advantage of the French socialist
system, which allows you to make the minimum wage and then some for two months
of work a year. Apparently, there are a slew of clever folk out there who spend
there winters working as ski instructors in the Alps and spend the rest of the
year lounging, traveling, eating their pain au chocolate, all the while being
paid a significant portion of their previous salary because, as the way the
government sees it, they paid their dues, their indefinite* contract was terminated*
and they need the money. So when we stereotype French people as fainéant, it’s
not completely because we think that real men should be required to put in 40
hours a week or because wine and cheese are inherently idle foods. The way I
see it, there’s some truth to any stereotype, some more than others. Whether
Americans stereotyping the French as lazy, lifeaholics has any merit to it,
I’ll let you be the judge.
*Note that for this special treatment, you must find an
employer who’s willing to offer you an indefinite contract, which he will then
terminate, all the while stating that you only worked the legal, 35 hours a
week. For this reason, not every frenchman can full take advantage of the system.
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