My Facebook has exploded with joy, “France has made it illegal to email employees after business hours, how great!”
But it’s not in the least great.
Unemployment in France is insane. For young people, it’s simply ridiculous. Finding anything but a succession of crappy short-term contracts is next to impossible. The few who do luck into a permanent job never leave it irrespective of how much they hate it because they know there will never be another permanent job in their lives. Professional realization is a very rare luxury in this environment. Gifted young people are running away in droves because the situation is so lousy.
The reason for all this misery is that labor relations are hopelessly over regulated. Employers and employees can’t develop mutually enriching relationships because they are never left alone to do so. This is one of those situations where the majority of good, reasonable people is suffering because of possible wrongdoing by a tiny minority. Most employers are good people, and so are most workers. But they all get to suffer because somebody somewhere might over reach. It’s totally an equivalent of that stupid affirmative consent deal applied to a different area of life.
My sister and her employees practically live in each other’s pockets. They are in touch at all hours, and what a wonderful, joyful environment their company is. It’s a place of personal and professional growth for employees and employers alike. It’s very easy to destroy this environment by convincing everyone that they are each other’s mortal enemies who should be permanently on guard against the opponent’s possible depredations.
Most employers are not evildoers. Most workers are not lazy layabouts who steal paper from the office. The more you are treated like a pig, however, the faster you become one. The last place we should envy in terms of labor relations is France where the workplace is poisoned with suspicion and resentment.
Clarissa's Blog 
There’s a simple rule, much like gravity.
More regulations on employment = less employment.
Many, fail to comprehend this. And this is not to say that employment should be a free-for-all but that the benefit of any regulations need to be balanced against the loss of employment that is inevitable in their wake.
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In countries like France or Spain, it’s been regulated right into ridiculously high unemployment. And still people are refusing to see cause and effect.
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What about illegal to expect a response after hours?
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The problem is, it’s entirely impossible to enforce. If someone expects, feels disappointed and, say, denies promotion as a result, there is no way of actually proving it. Expectations can’t be legislated.
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Yes, but you can create an institutional culture in which you are not a slave to email 24/7. I know the students would expect total availability because when you shop online you can go into chat with a representative or robot. You have to train them otherwise. An institution can do this.
However I don’t see how French companies will comply with this — the exact time a message goes out and arrives depends in part on how and what the server is doing. What will they do when someone complains that a message hit their inbox after hours? (Because I can see French people making that kind of complaint, sorry.)
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“Yes, but you can create an institutional culture in which you are not a slave to email 24/7. I know the students would expect total availability because when you shop online you can go into chat with a representative or robot. You have to train them otherwise. An institution can do this.”
“However I don’t see how French companies will comply with this — the exact time a message goes out and arrives depends in part on how and what the server is doing. What will they do when someone complains that a message hit their inbox after hours? (Because I can see French people making that kind of complaint, sorry.)”
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Is it really just over regulation creating job lock and under/unemployment or is something else to blame as well?
It’s just interesting to me that these attempts to create cordoned off hours and less work for actual employees haven’t resulted in more people being hired to take up the slack.
Do contract workers in France enjoy similar protections as employees? What rules apply to both contractors and employees alike? (I have no idea).
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In France and Spain, once you hire a person for a permanent position, you can’t fire them. You owe such a worker tons of benefits and perks while they owe you nothing. Obviously, the result is that employers avoid offering permanent contracts as much as they can. This is why in Spain, long before the crisis, when the economy was at its peak, unemployment never was lower than 20%. This is the number of people who are between short-term part-time contracts at any given time. Even when the economy is amazing. People end up working in short bursts: 3 months work, 2 months unemployment, then 4 months work, then unemployment again. Most people will never get out of this pattern and they know it. The result is the erosion of the very concept of permanent work, of a career.
Employers hate this, too. They want to hire people who will stay, learn their craft, form connections. But it’s too risky. You’ll never be able to get rid of the worker, no matter what they do. So the solution is only to hire people you already know for permanent jobs, such as relatives, for instance. So corruption and nepotism grow.
Intentions were great when this system was created but the result is fucked up.
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Can’t can’t fire them? Or can’t fire them “at will” but only “for cause” like some unionized jobs?
You’ll never be able to get rid of the worker, no matter what they do. So the solution is only to hire people you already know for permanent jobs, such as relatives, for instance. So corruption and nepotism grow.
But it’s standard business advice that most jobs aren’t even posted and you get them through networking or connections. So how is that substantially different? And most businesses in the US are small and those businesses are often family businesses. I never want to work as part of a family business again if I can possibly help it. It encourages such bad habits in everyone and people are terrible at separating out their feelings from work.
And it’s not as if contract work isn’t an increasingly prevalent norm in the US which has much less restrictions on hiring and firing and what you need to offer an employee. I can’t tell you how many people are illegally classified as contractors or interns.
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“Can’t can’t fire them? Or can’t fire them “at will” but only “for cause” like some unionized jobs?”
“But it’s standard business advice that most jobs aren’t even posted and you get them through networking or connections.”
“And it’s not as if contract work isn’t an increasingly prevalent norm in the US which has much less restrictions on hiring and firing and what you need to offer an employee.”
All of these vaunted 6-weeks vacations and long maternity leaves do exist en Europe. What nobody mentions, though, is that they only exist for permanent workers whose number is dwindling. There should be a balance between sustainable benefits and employers’ capacity to conduct business and make profit.
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Can’t fire them except for something so egregious that it never happens. Imagine you have an employee who is a falling down drunk. Or a drug addict who shoots up heroin in the office. After they make an ass out of themselves in front of clients a few times, you’d think you should be able to fire them, right? Well, wrong. Alcoholism and drug addiction are a disease and you can’t fire people for being ill. That’s just one example of what I consider to be an insane “worker protection” and it exists in Quebec, for instance.
But wouldn’t you be able to fire them for not doing their job, not their illness, and document “not doing their job” as a reason to fire them? I mean, there are quite a few functional alcohol and drug addicts who hold down steady well paying jobs. I guess I’m not really understanding how this is different.
And is anybody enjoying that a whole lot? No, they aren’t. Putting the possibility of permanent or long-term positions out of reach for everybody but a few who lucked into them 20 years ago would make things worse.
It strikes me that this situation resembles the state of academic hiring if you believe the Chronicle of Higher Education.
She actually only gets paid if the worker stays at the job. Everybody wants the best possible worker, not a friend or a relative. Who’d be willing to put their business at risk to give employment to relatives? But when there is no choice, that’s what people do and corruption grows. Besides, as you say, such arrangements are problematic because they are about more than work.
I have never known temp agencies to only get paid if the worker stays at the job, just if they find a placement. Obviously if the workers don’t stay it makes the company reluctant to hire the agency to fill placements, but that’s different than a contract stating the agency only gets paid if you stay [x] months. I’ve also seen poorly thought out businesses that exist for exactly the reason of giving employment to relatives.
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“But wouldn’t you be able to fire them for not doing their job, not their illness, and document “not doing their job” as a reason to fire them? ”
“It strikes me that this situation resembles the state of academic hiring if you believe the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
“I have never known temp agencies to only get paid if the worker stays at the job, just if they find a placement. ”
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Your sister’s company is a small company, from what I understand, and your sister goes to extreme lengths to take care of her employees.
We don’t need labor regulations to protect her employees. We need regulations to protect the millions of workers employed in gigantic, faceless corporations, where they are are likely to get in trouble for things like taking toilet breaks, or having the gall to get pregnant, or being a racial minority, or being a woman.
UPS drivers get measured down to the second from the time they unclick their seat belt to make a delivery to the time they click it back, and written up if they’re a few seconds ‘late’. Amazon employees who work in warehouses that are a quarter of a mile long are fucked if they happen to be on the other side of the building when their break starts. It would take more time to walk to to the other side to sit, so they just forgo their break.
From your own accounts, I would place your sister’s company in the top 0.001% of companies that take care of their employees. To use that in an argument to eliminate labor regulations is misleading.
Not wanting regulations? Wow, I didn’t think people had such nostalgia for the working conditions in coal mines a century ago.
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I know you didn’t call for eliminating labor regulations. My comment was a more general response to the libertarian types who see any regulation as tyranny.
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“My comment was a more general response to the libertarian types who see any regulation as tyranny.”
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“We need regulations to protect the millions of workers employed in gigantic, faceless corporations, where they are are likely to get in trouble for things like taking toilet breaks, or having the gall to get pregnant, or being a racial minority, or being a woman.”
“From your own accounts, I would place your sister’s company in the top 0.001% of companies that take care of their employees.”
“Not wanting regulations? Wow, I didn’t think people had such nostalgia for the working conditions in coal mines a century ago.”
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I have not observed all small and medium sized companies to be that generous to all workers.
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I guess it is more correlated with employees having some special and not easily replaceable skills than to the size of the company…
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Exactly.
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Or a personality type that is in demand. Finding people who are enthusiastic, eager, happy at work and don’t nurse endless grievances and don’t attach emotionally to work (a.k.a. psychologically healthy people) is quite hard. So every worker like that, skills or no skills, will be cherished.
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My observation is that workplaces that specifically advertise for personality often do not want psychologically healthy workers or attempt to grind such people down once they get there. They often want people who attach to work and then are shocked when they do and personalize things.
Psychologically healthy workplaces do not advertise as such but filter so that people who have such issues are repelled or do not last long. Happiness and enthusiasm cannot be manufactured or faked – not for very long.
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Dunno. I don’t think it’s just the size of the business. I have seen McDonald’s franchise restaurants with very high worker morale and good ability to advance; at our local place, the manager is a young Latino man whom I knew when he started at the drive though years ago; he is very capable in his role and the place is very well run and has a healthy vibe. In contrast, our local Target seems like an awful place to work, with cashiers acting like lobotomized zombies.
I don’t think one should ever underestimate the role of in-the-trenches leadership.
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The operative term is franchise. Most franchises are small businesses, with a headcount small enough that the owner can get to know each of his people, and the people get to know each other. In the rare corporate case, local managers are empowered to manage and can run their business as if they owned it. The culture in those locations is very different from normal, and those locations can be wildly more successful than the average.
Unfortunately, following the Wal-Mart model, most larger retailers focus on efficiency rather than customers. Like Starbucks, they want to provide “the identical customer experience” in every store, regardless of regional or local culture. To do that, they don’t want employees who think. They want employees who blindly follow rules. The customers they lose and the revenue they don’t capture in turn funds the small horde of upstart competitors, so perhaps that’s a good thing.
McDonalds’ in Japan has stores in which most employees have been replaced with robots. They could do that here, but its probably not cost effective. The Japanese situation is driven by a very real labor shortage. However, “robot” is a good characterization of what large retailers want their employees to be.
The desire for robotic employees also explains why companies regularly fire employees who show personal initiative — for example, rescuing someone in a parking lot who is having a health issue or being mugged. The employee may be a hero, but was doing something different than what he was told to do, and that’s not allowed. Example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/11/i-would-do-it-all-over-again-says-hero-fired-for-using-concealed-handgun-to-save-womans-life/
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“The desire for robotic employees also explains why companies regularly fire employees who show personal initiative”
Large companies. With a great individuality, go to a smaller / medium size business. They are starved for individuality and are shelling out enormous amount of money to find somebody non-robotic and somebody who doesn’t angrily demand to be micromanaged every second of the day.
Workers routinely throw tantrums and crying jags if they are asked to show the tiniest bit of initiative. And these are workers of all ages, so it’s not really generational.
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