President Hollande’s new whizz-kid economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, announced yesterday that, after a decade of economic decline, “la France est malade” and must rethink the way it works.
The words were barely out of his mouth before we witnessed a classic example of good old Gallic resistance.
The management and technicians’ wing of the CGT union wants to punish companies that make staff respond to email or work on digital devices outside office hours. From commuting to bed-time, minutes spent working on a screen must be debited from the maximum working week because they “blur the frontier between professional and private life,” it says.
But before we segue into a riff on the incorrigible, work-shy French with their long holidays and short weeks, it is