Re:Why France Has So Many 49-Employee Companies
by JVIDEL on Thursday May 10, 2012 @06:28PM
(#3956469)
Don't try to oversimplify this: Germans have some of the most skilled workforce in the world, and their small companies are very engineering heavy, unlike most French startups.
There's a long way between that, the American system and the French system, and the Germans have only just become competitive after being almost stagnated for over 20 years, but of course you don't care about this little fact just the part that benefits your point.
And if success is everything then you must be totally cool with the Chinese work-till-you-drop way since it works even better than the German option.
However I don't, and unlike you I see overderegulation and overregulation in the same way: they are both bad for business because each benefits one side and one side ONLY.
You need balance, get it?
In Germany, it's law that 50% of a corporate board must be made up of labor. That's one of the reasons why their companies are doing so well right now, because they don't make the stupid decisions that American companies make when management is so far removed from day-to-day operations. Where we would fire 20% of a company during a recession, the German government gives the workers a day off a week and pays their unemployment, so that the people have money in their pockets to keep the economy going.
So the real problem here is that the French government didn't anticipate conglomerates of 49 person companies skirting the laws. The reason unemployment is high is DUE to these 49 person companies, not in spite of them. If they had 50 or more people, then labor would vote to hire more workers, which is precisely what management doesn't want. They are just like management here, they want less labor, working longer/harder hours for less pay.
For anyone reading this, I highly recommend watching Thom Hartmann on FSTV for 2 weeks (http://www.thomhartmann.com), and you'll never look at civics/history/politics the same way again. There is a whole other side to these issues that we just don't get exposed to here in the US. For as much as hackers complain about being marginalized in the workplace, it worries me that we seem to be so misinformed about the root causes of it and how to solve it.