The abrasive tire CEO Maurice Taylor made news last week when he lashed out at French workers as “lazy” good-for-nothings.
Fortune goes along with that line in a piece run under this clickbait headline and subhed:
Are the French really that lazy?
A U.S. manufacturing executive ignited a firestorm after calling the French economy uncompetitive due to its unproductive labor force. He has a point.
The point being, according to Fortune, that strong unions and 35-hour workweeks and worker protections = an unproductive labor force. And the magazine also bemoans the fact that Taylor’s broadside prompted the French to defend themselves rather than navel-gaze:
Instead of opening a discussion in the country as to the possible merits of the executive’s views, blind nationalism overtook rational thought, creating an international incident.
Imagine the uproar here if, say, Michelin’s CEO had written something similar to the Commerce Secretary about Americans. Those kinds of firebombs don’t provoke calm discussions, and they’re not meant to.
Particularly when they’re not quite correct. French workers produce nearly as much (and by some measures, more) per hour than Protestant-work-ethic-addled Americans, and they’re more productive than the Germans or the Japanese.
The French work fewer hours—largely because they actually take vacations, the lazy bums!—but the hours they work, they work harder or smarter than Americans do. And they work 40-hour weeks, when you include overtime, Quartz points out.
But Fortune doesn’t get around to mentioning the whole French-are-as-productive-as-we-are thing until the 14th paragraph of its story about its “unproductive labor force”:
But working a lot more doesn’t necessarily mean that Americans are more productive than their French counterparts. One way to gauge productivity is to take a nation’s GDP and divide it by the total number of hours its citizens slaved away that year. In 2011, the GDP for each hour worked was $57 in France and $60 in the U.S. Therefore, it appears that while the French work less, they seem to be producing just as much as their U.S. counterparts, on a relative basis.
The French, as a society, have decided to put a little more life in their work-life balance than we do. Their labor laws might need some changing, but so might ours.
And by the way, Michelin is, as France’s industry minister noted in his response to Taylor, 20 times bigger and 35 times more profitable than Taylor’s Titan International.
Wow. That retort was weak, Ryan. The story asks the question and then explores the issue. What's wrong with that? The GDP per working hour is but ONE metric of productivity - not the be all end all.
I point out other metrics used to gauge productivity - one being Unit labor costs - specifically, focused on the manufacturing sector. As I pointed out ULC in French manufacturing is on the rise, which is a bad sign.
I spent hours pouring over OECD and French labor data to produce an original, interesting and provocative piece. I could have just looked at one metric but I chose to go the extra mile. That's why I get paid the big bucks.
#1 Posted by Cyrus Sanati, CJR on Tue 26 Feb 2013 at 04:40 PM
Yeah, Ryan. He did a lot of work to conclude that the French are lazy!
#2 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Tue 26 Feb 2013 at 05:35 PM
LOLZ - hilarious.
#3 Posted by Cyrus Sanati, CJR on Tue 26 Feb 2013 at 05:40 PM
The quote in the last paragraph is incorrect. Michelin’s recent 12-month sales were approximately $28.3 billion, compared with Titan’s proforma sales for 2012 of $2.42 billion, which makes Michelin only 11.7 times larger than Titan in sales. The term “profitable” refers to profit margins, not the absolute level of profits, and on that score, Michelin is approximately equal to Titan, not 35 times larger.
More importantly, Titan’s business is making wheels and tires for off-the-road (OTR) equipment, chiefly in the farm, construction, and mining industries, a field in which Titan is one of the largest companies in the world. Michelin’s tires are primarily for automobiles, which is a far larger market than OTR, which is why Michelin is 11.7 times larger than Titan.
#4 Posted by Alex Blanton, CJR on Wed 27 Feb 2013 at 01:18 PM
Ryan's usual forest/trees problems. French employers won't hire younger workers who are less skilled and less 'productive' in an absolute sense, but who may be marginally more productive to that employer if French politics had not larded up employee benefits. So the French work force is older and more skilled per unit worker than it would be if younger and less skilled workers were more economical to hire. The latter group is disproportionately French-born but of North African descent. So those work/life 'choices' made by the French protect 'native' French citizens and keep the 'outsiders' marginalized, who respond with protests like car-burning riots. Which in turn helps the National Front, a party much more radically xenophobic and popular than anything we see in the States.
French unemployment has been around the levels the US saw (9 or 10 percent) during the recession routinely for a generation. You see these youths selling toys to tourists all over the place, trying to make an extra Euro or two, while older white workers are protected by the government. Since this sort of thing can't go in forever, France faces a demographic nightmare of aging and decline among those 'productive' workers. Come go think of it, California (for different reasons) presents the same profile of high tax/regulation politics resulting in high unemployment and fiscal dysfunction. Great if you're a tech worker or public worker or big-industry worker, but the price is a permanent underclass. Alex's post exposes some of the slippery small-bore use of statistics employed to avoid confronting the Big Lie, that higher taxation and economic regulation provide wonderful benefits to all, and they don't cost anybody (except maybe 'the rich') anything.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 27 Feb 2013 at 07:16 PM
Mark brings some important context, right up until his last sentence.
#6 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 27 Feb 2013 at 07:24 PM
Thanks, Edward Ericson Jr. I didn't expect sympathetic comments from your corner. I apologizee for lazily using the 'Big Lie' expression that I criticized Ryan for using elsewhere. Nazi analogies are as useless as Communist ones, but have not quite been laughed out of our political discourse in the same way, and become parodies of a certain sort of reflexive political response.
My larger point, that CJR and other news media do not competently outline the trade-offs involved in taxation and regulation, that, I'll stick with, as a press criticism. Reductions in 'public services' are invariably described as 'Draconian' or some other severe language. No reporter within my hearing has described tax increases or new regulations in such terms, or suggested that cuts to the private sector will be 'Draconian', even in places like Illinois and California, with their inept and (for wired interest groups and individulas) greedy governance. And the language is borderline Orwellian - as in the current fight over 'the sequester', in which 'reductions' in federal spending of about $85 billion, or about 2%-3% of the federal budget, are in actuality reductions in projected higher spending.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 28 Feb 2013 at 01:02 PM