Dear Claire,

The problem with this article about work is that it revolves around the idea that working is an enriching experience. And, in some way it is. The author points out, and we all agree, that work is a way of crafting your personality and mastering your fate.

This is based on personal responsibility. This is a great way of seeing life. Nevertheless, most people (in the US, in France, or anywhere else) see work as an alienating, harsh experience. They naturally want to have less of it. And they are right too. People who have the possibility of enjoying work are usually lucky, and their number is not growing.

Why ? Because the interesting jobs (permanent or not) are a rare commodity (I have read the account of your life. I think it must have been pretty exciting).

What we have in France is tons of intelligent, educated people with great culture who have no chance of finding such jobs (this is the nature of the jobmarket). They are stuck in uninspiring jobs, and therefore their moments of enjoyment are made up by their time at home, with their family (here is an account Paul Krugman, that you should read http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/opinion/29krugman.html?ex=1280289600&en=3c228241f02da3b6&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss). No wonder they want stable jobs (most notably civil servant jobs), so that they do not have to suffer both at work and worry about their wellbeing.

Worse, we have hordes of uneducated people, without qualification.

You are praising Villepin’s determination and vision. I cannot agree with you. Villepin has a grand gaullist vision, something that our politicians (both socialist and gaullist) are suffering from.

They feel that they have to impose their solutions. So they are forgetting that employer-employee relationships should be determined by unions and big business, with the government acting only as a referee.

Instead of people coming to a compromise, the successive governments have come up with ideological responses. These hybrid, shaggily built, responses cannot satisfy anybody, because they are not the product of experience. Employees feel threatened, especially if they try to use the rights they are given ; employers feel like they cannot do anything. Meanwhile, unions and employers have become popular scapegoats for the public (they are conservatives, they are archaic, blah blah blah...)

We should scrap the whole system, and rewrite the whole work legislation around real negociation, instead of waiting for Godot (Ah ! French people are « veaux » as De Gaulle said, awaiting Deus ex Machina, pretty much like anywhere else, unfortunately ..). Villepin feels he is the messiah. That is why he fails spectacularly.

Our messianic political institutions have also to be scrapped. They put too much responsibility on political elites, who do not have the shoulders to carry the burden, and not enough in the hands of citizens, who are in the midst of a troubled slumber.

I hope they will awake in time to stop the extremes from gaining to much strength.

Yours,

Elias