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France and Secularism

From what I can tell, if they ever add striking as an Olympic event the French public workers are a cinch for the gold medal.

And that's a good point...if the French government wanted to get rid of the holiday then why didn't the use a religion/secular justification for it instead of an economic one?
 
Number Six said:
And that's a good point...if the French government wanted to get rid of the holiday then why didn't the use a religion/secular justification for it instead of an economic one?
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Well, they tried. As the Wall Street Journal points out in a recent editorial, the situation is a gold mine of irony (gold? iron? hmmm...)
Hell hath no fury like a French Communist denied a Christian day of leisure. Peace won't reign in the land of cheese and wine, proclaim the prophets from the country's trade unions, until Paris gives back the Whitmonday holiday.

For the religiously inclined, the holy day Whitsunday, or Pentecost, falls as always on the seventh Sunday after Easter. A state fiat won't change that, and the French Catholic Church didn't protest when the authorities recently proposed to cancel the national holiday called "Pentecost" to raise two billion euros -- a cut of that day's work -- for a special fund to care for the elderly created in the wake of the 2003 heat wave, which killed thousands of seniors. But the majority of Frenchmen -- 66% according to a survey in Le Parisien daily -- consider that Monday sacred.

So a self-avowedly secular Republic with diminishing church attendance fights Marxist -- aka the religion-as-opiate creed -- trade unions to drop a Christian holiday from the calendar. The government even implores the public in quasi-religious terms to make this "sacrifice" in the name of "national solidarity." "This is not solidarity, this is a rip-off!" responds the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), a big union. Righteous anger over Pentecost could break out in national strikes next Monday.

When we first tried to reach CGT for comment, no one answered the phone at the union's offices Friday, officially a working day. You see, last Thursday was Ascension, a holy Christian day that remains a state holiday, which emptied France's cities and offices for the long weekend. In France , the real state religion is vacation.
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:)
 
The French attitude towards holidays and PTO is amazing. I mentioned to a non-union french worker the idea of reducing the government mandated 5 week PTO to 4 weeks and he started hollering about "SOCIAL REGRESSION!".

I hope developing countries take a cue about using the goverment as a labor union and the consequences.
 
corplinx said:
The French attitude towards holidays and PTO is amazing. I mentioned to a non-union french worker the idea of reducing the government mandated 5 week PTO to 4 weeks and he started hollering about "SOCIAL REGRESSION!".

I hope developing countries take a cue about using the goverment as a labor union and the consequences.
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That's all they've got to comfort themselves with. They're hated by their neighbors, their former power and prestige is lost forever, their culture has become so pathetic and reflexive that they import anti-Americanism from America, unemployment is skyrocketing - what else do they HAVE except long vacations? But even all that time off isn't enough to make them happy. I guess it can't really: the Onion hit pretty close to home with one of their "old" papers: "French playwrite says that Hell is other French people."
 
Ziggurat said:
That's all they've got to comfort themselves with. They're hated by their neighbors, their former power and prestige is lost forever, their culture has become so pathetic and reflexive that they import anti-Americanism from America, unemployment is skyrocketing - what else do they HAVE except long vacations?
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Personally, I'd rather have long vacations than the love of my neighbors, a powerful and prestigious government and low unemployment.
 
Tony said:
Personally, I'd rather have long vacations than the love of my neighbors, a powerful and prestigious government and low unemployment.
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You'd feel that way if you were one of the employed. But how about if you were one of the unemployed and reducing the vacation of the employed people might result in the creation of a job for you?
 
Number Six said:
reducing the vacation of the employed people might result in the creation of a job for you?
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Wouldn't that work the other way?
 
Number Six said:
You'd feel that way if you were one of the employed. But how about if you were one of the unemployed and reducing the vacation of the employed people might result in the creation of a job for you?
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I see your point, but are you saying that I (if I was employed in France) should be willing to lower my standard of living so someone else can have a job?
 
Bjorn said:
Wouldn't that work the other way?
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Well, I think that's what France was thinking too when they instituted the 35 hour work week...reduce the number of hours the workers are working and that will leave some work undone, thus creating jobs for the unemployed. But somehow it turned out to have the opposite effect for reasons I'm not clear on. It may be that productivity per worker is down (since each worker works less) and as a result employers have less incentive to hire additional workers than they used to. Some economic minded person can probably explain it better than I.
 
Tony said:
I see your point, but are you saying that I (if I was employed in France) should be willing to lower my standard of living so someone else can have a job?
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No, I was just saying that your remark about liking their setup better only makes sense from the POV of someone that has a job from which to take vacation in the first place.

I can understand those workers (or any workers) trying to get the best deal they can. That's how things work. But while working less for the same amount of money is one way of increasing standard of living, working the same for more money is another way and from what I understand they're forced to do the former and not permitted to do the latter.
 
Number Six said:
Well, I think that's what France was thinking too when they instituted the 35 hour work week...reduce the number of hours the workers are working and that will leave some work undone, thus creating jobs for the unemployed. But somehow it turned out to have the opposite effect for reasons I'm not clear on. It may be that productivity per worker is down (since each worker works less) and as a result employers have less incentive to hire additional workers than they used to. Some economic minded person can probably explain it better than I.
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I'll just have to wait, then. :)
 
Bjorn said:
Wouldn't that work the other way?
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As pointed out, in demonstrably did not have that effect. But to believe that it WOULD have that effect, you have to basically buy into a lump theory of labor - that is, that there's a fixed amount of work to be done. But this is as false as the lump theory of wealth, which also leads to disastrous economic policy, whereby governments become obsessed with the distribution of that wealth and stifle the creation of more wealth.

The amount of work to be done is not fixed, it is infinite. Companies make decisions on cost-benefit when they decide to hire employees. Enforcing a 35-hour work week basically raises the cost of employing people across the entire economy, since you're artificially limiting the economic benefit each employee can provide. So of COURSE that's going to raise unemployment. Rather than hiring more people to do the same amount of work, companies are just going to make due with less work. Bad for the economy, bad for employment, and VERY bad for the future prospects of what has become a welfare state with imploding demographics.

Long vacations are fine and dandy, and the French can prefer them to economic prosperity (or old folks who don't die from a summer heat wave) till the cows come home. But the situation is simply not sustainable, and THAT, ultimately, is where they're deluding themselves.
 
Tony said:
Personally, I'd rather have long vacations than the love of my neighbors, a powerful and prestigious government and low unemployment.
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Seconded. Work to live, don't live to work. And do neither for the sale of owning gewgaws.
 
CapelDodger said:
Seconded. Work to live, don't live to work. And do neither for the sale of owning gewgaws.
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I agree...work to live, don't live to work. And I think that in the US people work too much. But then again I see France where bureaurcrats are working 35 hours a week and getting 5 or more weeks of vacation per year (a bureaucratic job already being one famous for not doing much) and I'm thinking "The wealth to support these people has to come from somewhere because they're likely not generating it themselves through their work."

I'm 20-25 years from retirement and I yearn for it sometimes but then I think about it and go "Gee, when I retire I'll be doing _nothing_ and yet I'll be able to live and eat and drink and travel and use public roads and buy clothes and on and on and on...despite the fact that at that time I'll be doing _nothing_." (Assume for the sake of argument I'm in complete retirement rather than partial retirement.)

Somebody has to support you if you do nothing...in the case of working until retirment then you're effectively supporting yourself from the money you saved while you were working (unless you consider pensions being wealth transfer programs but let's not get into that for now). So the fact that someone has to support you when you retire (yourself or others) that means you should do some work while you're working and 35 hours per week with 5+ weeks of vacation at a government job just doesn't seem like enough. Hey, I'd like to just work 35 hours a week with 5+ weeks of vacation too but I don't see how I can justify it to myself because if I do so I'm simply not working enough. I want big output for little input but I realize that just can't work on the large scale.

Incidentally I see this as being related to the estate tax too. Giving some money to your kids is one thing but it bugs me when people are allowed to pass on huge fortunes because it practically guarantees the next generation will be nothing more than spongers off the folks that are currently working...growing the food, building the roads, etc, while the person that inherits the money doesn't have to do anything except hand over some money that they didn't earn in the first place.
 
Shane Costello said:
Abolition of Pentecost Holiday Causing Ructions in France

Considering that France has banned overtly religious symbolism from it's schools, why has it retained an overtly religious public holiday? Why has it got rid of it in the name of economic, rather than constitutional, reform? Anybody know something I don't?
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Just an impression, but I think Chirac's losing it (if not lost it). His party's definitely lost it( apart from what they've shipped to Zurich and pretended to have lost), so they're no help. He's no spring chicken, lots of which are coming home to roost and crapping on him. There's the referendum, the relationship with the US, suitcase-full-of-cash stories, just one thing overlapping another - the chap definitely needs a holiday.

The Brits handled Churchill's ... declining years a lot better, as did the US with the Reagan's ... forgetful period. But that's the French for you. Bloody hopeless.
 
Number Six said:
Incidentally I see this as being related to the estate tax too. Giving some money to your kids is one thing but it bugs me when people are allowed to pass on huge fortunes because it practically guarantees the next generation will be nothing more than spongers off the folks that are currently working...growing the food, building the roads, etc, while the person that inherits the money doesn't have to do anything except hand over some money that they didn't earn in the first place.
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Seconded. Vigorously. Have I finally found an ally on this profoundly important issue the day I changed my sig? If so it's spooky.
 
Number Six said:
it bugs me when people are allowed to pass on huge fortunes because it practically guarantees the next generation will be nothing more than spongers off the folks that are currently working
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If they inherit huge fortunes, how are they spongers? Are they going to get free medical care and free food and subsidized housing?
...growing the food, building the roads, etc, while the person that inherits the money doesn't have to do anything except hand over some money that they didn't earn in the first place.
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So they should be forced to hand over some of that money to the government. And what has the government done to "earn" that money, other than hang around until its owner died?
 
If they inherit huge fortunes then they're in a position where they (and their heirs) can live off the efforts of others in perpetuity, which is what I consider sponging.

The government didn't earn the inheritance but neither did the heir. When someone dies with a lot of money their money has to go somewhere. No matter where it goes it will be going to someone/something that didn't earn it so the question is, where should it go? People should be able to will it wherever they want to will it but that shouldn't necessarily mean they can avoid tax consequences. Why should a living person only be able to give me 11 K tax free but a dead person be able to give me $1 B tax free?

We have rules about how things are taxed when they're given away and that's what this comes down to...what should be the rules for money bequeathed to others? It's not a private issue any more than the question of income tax or property tax or any other kind of tax. People have private assets but they're not private to the point that they can do absolutely anything with them. They live in a society and the society as a whole makes the rules.
 
Labor creates wealth. That's what many socialists refuse to believe. Wealth is not a pie to be divided, wealth is the pie our labor creates and which we strive to make bigger.

Someone help me here.............I read recently (Slate mag?) that Norway was not as wealthy as it thought. In fact, when compared to the 50 U.S. states, it ranked well down on the list.

If you have a society that passes out checks to anyone who claims to be unable to work due to a back ache, guess what? A heck of a lot of people are going to have back aches.
 
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