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  • If only…

    (A Frenchman)

    • Can we get more details on this?

      I'd like to hear something more nuanced than the bumper sticker logic that seems to always float to the top of this community

      • Liberal policies have done a lot of harm to the French system. We still have a lot of holidays, probably more than anywhere else (minimum 5 weeks, sometimes 6 or 7, and then, if you have more than 35h/week, you have even more, up to 11 days/year for 39h/week).

        But healthcare and unemployment are being dismantled over the years.

        Government is planning a law this autumn to force people to work to get the lowest unemployment income (what you get after 2 years of unemployment, or if you never worked). Unemployment became harder (you get less for less time).

        Public healthcare is understaffed and underfunded. There are more and more wait before you can get an appointment and the quality is decreasing. You more and more need a complementary insurance to cover the full cost, because the public one covers only a part of the cost or not some specific cares.

        Police is becoming litteraly fascist, asking for special laws applying to them. And the government consider giving it to them. They are asking for more weapons, and they are asking to clean the vermin from the cities (litteral words they use, I consider this sedition). Currently the government plays nice to the police because they're scared if what would happen if they didn't. Especially since they rely a lot on the police to shit down protests.

        Protest are severly repressed by the police, and the right to protest is in actual danger because if the préfet (chief of police in a department, appointed by the government, representative of the government locally and responsible for the security of the department ; a department is a small administrative region) decides that your work is necessary, then you can be drafted to work. Public services are already unable to protest (in hospitals for example).

        Information is very concentrated. TV channels are possessed by like 4 people, same for newspapers. And public ones are less and less independant.

        This autumn will be very hot. Right now it's the holidays. In September both school and assembly will get back to work, and the government is planning to anger teachers, one of the most powerful union in the country, and several questionable security laws. Government has no legitimity but hide behind the discourse that "no one else has legitimity either".

        I don't think we have it worse than in many places, but it's getting worse for us. Fighting in the beginning of this year didn't got us anything for retirement (now 65yo to get it).

      • France is far from a worker's paradise:

        • The last time a slightly leftist government was elected was in 1981, and they turned neoliberal in 1983. Since then, worker's right are fought by successive governments.
        • And successfully so: the last time a national worker's movement won anything was in 1995 (in 2006 there was a student's victory though).
        • Only 10% of the workers are in an Union, same as in the US.

        However, it's not a hell neither:

        • French work 1511 hours by year, indeed under the OECD average (1751) or the Americans (1810) but higher than Germans (1340) who have the reputation to be workaholics.

        The reputation is however not without basis:

        • French have the highest number of strike days by year for 1000 workers (114), far more than Americans (6). But iy should be noted that not everyone strikes in France, generally the civil servants or employees of State owned firms strike for the others. I did not found the exact number, but for private firms' employees, the number of strike days on average will be far lesser than 114 (but probably more that 6 ^^). And these hours are not paid, thus a lowering of quality of life.
82 comments