[lit-ideas] Re: French effiiciency spawns riots?
- From: Michael Chase <goya@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:08:56 +0100
Le 14 nov. 05, à 21:31, Eric Yost a écrit :
How about this thesis? The author argues that creating a civilized
labor system has made the French more vulnerable to rioting
miserables.
(Sort of depressing to think that one can't have a system where
leisure and self-actuation are important without creating a drugged up
and violent underclass. I mean, the US has a drugged up and violent
underclass as well as long work hours.)
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113131949542689562-
lMyQjAxMDE1MzAxNzMwMTc5Wj.html
A French employee works 30% fewer hours than a British worker, and a
much smaller percentage of the French population than the British
works at all, yet total French output is very nearly equal in value to
British. In other words, the French are much more efficient
economically than the British. But their relative efficiency has been
bought at a price: the creation of a large caste of people more or
less permanently unintegrated into the rest of society
M.C. There might be some truth in this. But, like Eric says, it doesn't
seem necessary to be efficient to have "a large caste of people more or
less permanently unintegrated into the rest of society". Surely most,
if not all, industrial societies have such a "caste" - not really a
caste, because social mobility, while infrequent, is not impossible.
When the French started realizing they needed more manual laborers
about a generation ago, they opened up the borders to workers from
North Africa (and later sub-Saharan Africa as well). These workers
initially lived in appalling conditions in cardboard shacks to the
North of Paris : gradually French authorities built "cities" for them,
which were architecturally state-of-the-art when built but now, forty
or so years later, are run-down and infinitely depressing. So far so
good : but the French state's main error was to take a hands-off
approach to these cities and assume they would solve their own
problems.
It didn't happen that way. For while the original immigrants worked
their butts off in low-paying service, domestic and construction jobs,
maintaining their own language and customs and sending a lot of their
salaries back home, their French-born children often felt cut off from
their roots and uninterested in following in their parents' footsteps
(the reasons for this are multiple, including exposure to contemporary
French culture, advertising and, importantly, globalized hip-hop urban
culture). Broken off from their roots and with no particular way of
integrating French culture at any level other than the menial level of
their parents, these kids wound up angry and with nothing to lose.
A sad and disastrous situation, to be sure. But is it really all that
different from the situation of alienated youth in East L.A., Spanish
Harlem, Detroit, Manchester, or Leeds? The difference from the U.S. is
partly geographical : whereas the urban poor tend to congregate around
the center of U.S. cities, these same classes are dispersed in the
southern and especially northern suburbs (banlieue) of Paris, where
they have been abandoned by police and social services for a generation
now.
What France needs would be a suburban equivalent to the US.programs of
urban renewal. Or rather, that would be a start : I rather doubt it
would actually solve any issues. Anything, however, would be better
than the intensely stupid response of the French government so far :
more force, more coercion, more authority, in the form of curfews,
expanded police powers and expulsions. Authority is precisely what
these kids are rebelling against : keep giving them more of it, and the
more they'll rebel. Doesn't take a rocket scientist...
Best, Mike.
Michael Chase
(goya@xxxxxxxxxxx)
CNRS UPR 76
7, rue Guy Moquet
Villejuif 94801
France
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