"French leaders propose easing restrictions to boost jobs" by Greg Keller, Associated Press December 11, 2014
PARIS — Creating jobs in France is proving harder than expected.
The embattled Socialist-led government is making its second push this year to energize the labor market in Europe’s second-largest economy, after a top economic official called the previous plan ‘‘a failure.’’
Although President Francois Hollande has made cutting unemployment the cornerstone of his tenure, the jobs market is getting worse. Unemployment climbed to 10.4 percent in the third quarter from 10.1 percent in the previous three months, despite a package of payroll tax cuts for businesses this year that was meant to encourage hiring.
Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday presented a new bundle of policies — a ‘‘growth and activity’’ bill. It has sharply divided Hollande’s own Socialist Party but drawn praise from France’s powerful business lobby, Medef, which contends that previous efforts did not go far enough.
Macron is a former Rothschild investment banker chosen by Hollande to replace Socialist firebrand Arnaud Montebourg in August. Four months into the job, Macron has been thrust onto the front lines of France’s effort to create jobs.
It is where the journey begins, continues, and ends.
‘‘Macron’s Law,’’ as the bill has been dubbed, is a range of measures aimed at boosting employment by freeing up some of France’s notoriously inflexible labor regulations.
The proposed changes include relaxing rules for stores on Sunday and evening opening hours; removing some restrictions on new bus lines to increase competition with national rail operator SNCF; and opening up regulated professions such as notaries and auctioneers to greater competition.
The bill also calls for revamping France’s complex system of labor relations boards, and selling roughly $7.5 billion worth of the French state’s $94 billion holdings of corporate assets.
The French Parliament will begin debating the bill next month, but it has already sparked controversy, with opponents planning a protest at the weekly Cabinet meeting.
Owning up to his failure to meet a pledge to start cutting unemployment by last year, Hollande said last month that if he still hasn’t succeeded in the next two years, he will not run in 2017. The European Union, which has put France — along with a number of other countries — under surveillance for exceeding agreed-to limits on its deficit, forecasts its jobless rate will remain above 10 percent at least until 2016.
Hollande has blamed a lack of economic growth for unemployment’s continued rise this year; the jobless rate was 9. 7 percent when he came into office in 2012, and has been rising since early 2008. The country’s economic growth is expected to be 0.4 percent this year, and 1 percent next year.
Macron himself said the government’s last big effort, the so-called Responsibility Pact unveiled in January, was a failure.
Business owners are not the only ones dissatisfied with the economy’s handling. A survey published by French business daily Les Echos on Monday showed nine out of 10 French people disapprove of the government’s economic policy.
At least their is hope.
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So how you French people liking the expensive occupations and wars?
Also see:
"US fines French firm $772 million for ‘brazen’ bribery
NEW YORK — The French industrial giant Alstom will plead guilty and pay $772 million in a US Justice Department bribery investigation. Alstom, a power company that also makes trains, was targeted in the probe of a plot involving tens of millions of dollars in bribes paid to officials in Indonesia and other countries to win power contracts. The criminal penalty is the largest ever levied by the United States for foreign bribery. Part of the bribery plot was carried out in Windsor, Conn., where Alstom Power has headquarters, the Justice Department said. Alstom’s corruption scheme, said James Cole, deputy attorney general, “was astounding in its breadth, its brazenness."
Why is the bankrupt U.S. government shaking down French companies?
Related: French court declines to ban Uber
