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US CEO Says French Workers Have Three-Hour Work Day
First time accepted submitter M3.14 writes "In a letter addressed to French Industrial Renewal Minister, Maurice Taylor, chief executive of Titan, writes (French article with English letter) that it would be stupid to buy any factory in France since workers don't really work full time. He'd rather buy cheap factories in India and China instead and import tires back to France. He writes, 'They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!'"
Thanks to the erosion of unions, as well as a proliferation of anti-worker laws Americans don't have to worry about personal time or their health. In fact, we can't really worry about either.
It's pathetically easy to get American's to forsake their vacations, their personal time, their families in order to pad a sleazy company's bottom line.
Well... they can get another job you say... Well the union busting plantation owners made sure that the vast majority of America's jobs abuse their employees, so you can only choose among bad options.
There are exceptions to every rule, but Americans have been voting against our own interest for at least the last 30.
Don't pat yourself on the back for opening your country up to near slave labor practices.
So we have demonstrably false stereotypes of the French being played up by a conservative who prefers labor practices which exploit workers. As a fellow American, may I just say not everyone here would mock a country for having respect for the well being and rights of its citizens, even those who have a job.
Funny that the summary doesn't include his initial statement to the French industry official that approached him: "How stupid do you think we are?"
In a word: Very.
CNN observes that Taylor is not only a relic of the 80s' leveraged buyout "corporate raiders" era, he's a hypocrite as well for wanting to make tires in China:
"The U.S. government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don't get the duties, the government does," said Taylor.
All of this is beside the point however. US workers have less vacation/break time than anyone else on the planet, in a time where it is increasingly recognized that giving more breaks to workers results in more productivity. The real stupidity comes from failing to notice how well the rest of the world can keep pace with the much-vaunted "American productivity" while maintaining a vastly better quality of life.
Oh Yes.
Come down to India and China, where we have no goddamn lives any more. We work more than 12 hours a day on menial tasks at odd times. Forget work-life balance, because we really have no lives. And we work because that's how poor we are, with little choice in life and no government looking out for us. Train us. Use us. Abuse us. Talk to us in racial undertones. Marvel at our ability to take crap for little money.
Get away with your profits.
Welcome to the bright world of outsourcing.
Everyone votes as if they are the fabulously wealthy fat cat, that they dream about being. The reality is that they are a slave, and by accepting the "winner takes all" mindset, they are merely further enriching the tiny population of existing winners. Much better to accept that the typical American is a wage slave, and that the country should be run for the benefit of the wave slave majority (gasp, socialism!)
Talk about how much they get done.
If I had a bunch of workers that worked for an hour, but got the same amount of work done as another bunch of workers would in ten hours (assume that the groups are the exact same size), I would happily pay that first bunch a full day's pay of $X rather than pay the second bunch a full day's pay of $X. Sure, they're working fewer hours ... but they're getting more done, so I'd be getting better value for money.
You get what you measure; if you're measuring the hours worked, you might not be getting the productivity for those hours that you hope for.
Compare programmers. You'll get better results if they work their 40 hours a week and relax out of hours than if you drive them to work 60 or 80 hours in crunch mode for months on end.
How many hours a day do you spend zoning out in meetings? That's the American Way.
Three hours actual productive work per day? I wish. Air thieves doing negative work everywhere. 'We should put together a committee to study the problem, meet once a week.' I run when I hear that phrase. Actually I run when I see where the conversation is headed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, but for the time being, they still have a market to sell goods produced by labor paid at third world rates for first world prices. Sure, it'll dry up eventually, and then they're back to the same profit margins that they'd have if they both made and sold it there - but they'll make a hefty profit until then. And what of it if the new market is China? It doesn't really matter if it's made for $2 and sold for $3, or made for $20 and sold for $30 - especially when the purchasing power of that $2 is that much higher (which it will be once the wages are depressed lower in first world countries due to outsourcing).
Anyway, much as I don't trust the notion that free market solves all problems, this isn't a failure of the free market. The problem here is that while companies are free to shop for labor where it's cheaper, even across country lines, workers can't shop for higher-paid jobs across the same. So the workforce is artificially segregated into compartments, enabling price discrimination between them. Of course this situation will be abused in a capitalist economy, so long as it's legal and it makes money! The only two workarounds are to either let the labor flow freely as well (i.e. open immigration), or impose tariffs on foreign goods to counterbalance the cost of living differences. Both approaches come with strings attached, but the former is straight out nonviable for many reasons (the amount of migration that'll have to happen to even the market is far beyond what first world countries can manage to handle), while the latter would actually work. Ironically, it's being argued against on "free market" basis, even though all it'd do is make the market more free (or at least more balanced!).
...And it didn't really work, apparantly. France is only two placed behind the US in GDP per hour worked.
US Productivity has been rising since the beginning.
Since 1970 it's more than doubled.
Productivity in the US is so high that if it were equally distributed, everyone could get $38,000 worth of stuff - every man, woman, and child in the country - and then do it again next year. And the year after that.
Our productivity is so high we're beginning to run out productive job slots. To take an example, the number of people needed in agriculture is vanishingly small compared to the number needed a hundred years ago. Machines now do most of the work.
We read about this all the time: Google's self-driving car will put professional drivers out of work, Watson will put many doctors out of work... the list goes on.
Our culture requires people to work in order to be valid members. We look down upon people receiving welfare, government aid, social security, and so on. The talk around Washington is that people on medicare are moochers! Let's get rid of it and make them pay their own way!
We've doubled productivity, yet we haven't reduced the time we're required to work - in our "race to the bottom" people are working longer hours for ever lowering wages. Sometimes people have to work 3 jobs just to get by.
The solution is to reduce the weekly workload of all employees. If we went to a 30-hour work week with overlapping days, we could eliminate unemployment and pay everyone a living wage. As productivity rises, we could cut the working hours even more.
If we were more like the French, people would have more leisure time to enjoy the fruits of a highly productive society.
Don't knock the French - they've got this "working for a living" thing figured out.
I would have too. Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to charge ten times the cash and do a quarter of the work deserves to starve. Unions can protect you from a lot of bad things but your own greed, laziness, and stupidity are not among them.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Also misinformed about China. They get 1 hr lunch and 1 hour nap (for reals).
Then if he's paying attention to his peon...I mean subordinates, he'd realise that the typical Chinese day consists of:
- 3 hours of work
- 1 hour of lunch
- 1 hour of nap
- 3 hours of ineptly expressing why something can't be done as specified and must be redesigned with all chinese parts and chinese sources or made so cheap that it really can only ever possibly barely work
- 2 hours of fighting to get an american engineer sent overseas for 3 weeks to "expedite completion" (read: do the hard work for them)
- 1 hour of making cheesy power points that end with bad clip art of disembodied hands shaking
- a combined total of 1 hour of misunderstandings due to language/cultural/time zone issues
- 2 hours of business dinners that seriously involve getting each other as piss drunk as possible
- 1 hour of helping the american you suckered in to visiting the asshole of China (it's never shanghai or beijing, it's always some shithole like guangdong or shenzhen) get laid by a prostitute
- the rest is lost in blackouts
At the end of the day, people are people and work as much as they're going to work based on how motivated they are. Given that capitalism does not actually exist for the vast majority of the world (including Americans), that means not so much.
Dude - read what the GP said again. He wasn't ranting about union members. He was ranting about union administrators. And he has a point.
Take for example Craig Thomson. He was the national secretary of the Health Services Union in Australia, so he was supposed to represent those nurses and ambulance drivers you were talking about. Instead he flew around Australia spending their money on prostitutes and funding his personal political campaign.
Note that he was never a health professional himself, but before getting on the union gravy train he studied to become a lawyer.
This is the type of scum that the GP is talking about - that has infested the top administrative levels of a lot of unions. There are more examples of union corruption than I can be bothered to list here. Anyone who doesn't think that the union movement needs a cleanup is wearing blinkers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
It already is feudalism. The difference is that we call our "lords" a CEO.
Otherwise, it all applies pretty well.
I would have too. Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to charge ten times the cash and do a quarter of the work deserves to starve. Unions can protect you from a lot of bad things but your own greed, laziness, and stupidity are not among them.
Careful what you wish for: someone somewhere can do your job cheaper too.
Indeed. Damn those people who think we should be trying to make our lives easier rather than a handful of obscenely rich individuals even wealthier !
The french minister sent an answer to Maurice Taylor (who is known to be a troll btw). I couldn't find an english translation but it's a well written answer. (sorry, only pdf's and jpg available at this time)
answer page 1
answer page 2
About the 3h/day of talking, the factory was in a transition period where they temporarily switched their production line from tires for car to tires for truck, and the production line for car tires wasn't fully operational anymore. Taylor would have sent the workers home without payment, but the french union refused. That's their difference.
Of course french workers are not allowed to chat for 3h/day, anyone with a sane mind and who have worked in real life understands this.
"I think the issue is when you feel that you deserve to work a couple hours a day (or week) and get paid more than other people who work for 10s of hours a week (or day) and be paid the same amount."
I suppose that depends on what you do in those hours. It is quite likely you pay your attorney and your doctor as much or more for working a few hours as you pay your grunts for working a full time week.
There is truth in this though. An hour of one man's life is not worth more than another. You can make up lost dollars but not lost hours. The doctor and the lawyer just invested dollars and hours up front. There is no reason their total lifetime earnings should exceed that of the grunt plus the cost of their education unless they are working more hours overall and then the increase should be relative to the number of extra hours.
An important thing for an employer to remember is that the worth of an employee isn't defined by the going market rate for labor. The worth of an employee is the total gross profit of the organization divided by the total number of employees. You then average education hours and hours worked and adjust up or down at the individual level based on their relative education hours and hours worked. There is a rampant fallacy that overseeing 30 employees makes you more valuable than those employees. If it takes you 40 hours to oversee a staff of 40 you aren't more valuable than an employee under you working 40 hours. A related fallacy is that the stress of white collar work is somehow worse than that of physical labor. This is nothing but an attempt to shed guilt from accepting disproportionate pay and a lack of desire to perform physical labor. Another myth is that people are somehow magically more valuable because they are close to the source of revenue. It isn't uncommon to see 5-20% of revenue pissed away at the sales staff. In reality long term sales performance is dictated not by fast talking sales staff and their relationships with clients but by the output of the low paid grunts actually making the goods and performing the services. The "relationship" is based on the sales staff "shooting the client straight" which amounts to having sold them quality goods and services over time. Not only are sales staff not worth 5-20% they don't actually work anywhere near the number of hours they would report.
A similar fallacy is that living your job somehow amounts to actually working more hours. You might work at random times, you might be thinking about work during off hours, but typically staff that "live their job" are deluding themselves with regard to their significance in the overall machine. Usually this is seen in executives and for the most part everyone past middle management is either doing what middle management has told them needs done or getting in the way. They have far more ability to screw things up than to fix it. They'll spend 60hrs a week in useless meetings to produce a couple hours worth of output. Working at a higher level doesn't make the problems more difficult or require more time than working at the bottom. To make it worse these individuals often would count countless hours socializing with their peers as work because their peers are similar executives. Shareholders are only worth something at the point of investment, after investment they aren't worth anything at all!
All of this staff is needed but their contribution is not really more than that of the grunts. If your organization has grunts that are professionals the grunts are probably each worth more than any manager or executive in your organization. The market dictates what you pay staff but that has very little relation to what they are actually worth. Investors aren't worth anything at all!
So what? The french are the most productive people in the world while working less hours, and morons call them lazy.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-grizz-mauls-lazy-french-workers-over-threehour-day-8503804.html - stupid traditional business thinking more hours = more productivity
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-08-20/markets/30087051_1_capita-france-s-gdp-work - some facts and figures
The USA is no more democratic than the USSR was communist.
Fixed.
"There is no reason their total lifetime earnings should exceed that of the grunt plus the cost of their education unless they are working more hours overall and then the increase should be relative to the number of extra hours."
Pure and utter bull.
People have different abilities, different aptitudes, different attitudes, different personalities, etc etc and so forth.
A doctor will always have a greater worth to society and economy than a burger flipper. Always. You cannot argue otherwise.
It's also much harder to become doctor, there are far fewer people able to do it, and who want to do it.
So why in hell should the burger flipper be entitled to as much lifetime earnings as the doctor?
Don't you realize that if an economy were managed in such a way you effectively create huge disincentive for people to become doctors? Some still will, but many will look at Easy Path A compared to Hard Path B, see they achieve the same result, and thus choose A.
If someone is content to be a burger flipper their whole life, have at it. I've known a few people who were fine with it (though eventually two of them decided to open their own place and now have a successful local chain, and just sold their first franchise a few hundred miles away).
As a humanist, the inclination is to say that people have the same worth. And they do on a human scale.
But when it comes to how they choose to spend their time in trade for money, they absolutely do have different worths.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I think the issue is when you feel that you deserve to work a couple hours a day (or week) and get paid more than other people who work for 10s of hours a week (or day) and be paid the same amount.
I own a business. I'm in the business of selling my labor. Therefore, I'm going to maximize MY profits. That means getting paid as much as I can for as little work as possible. If business owners shouldn't be stigmatized for being greedy assholes, then workers shouldn't be stigmatized for being lazy assholes.
This double standard has to go.