Foreign Perspectives

In Belfast just about every shop window has a “help wanted” notice. In France, I’ve yet to see one.

How does that square with the 35 hour week in periods coming up to the likes of Christmas? That’s a very good question as clearly the shops are considerably busier over the pre-Christmas period than they are normally. In Belfast which doesn’t have the 35 hour limitation and few limitations on overtime, they still want more staff over peak shopping periods yet France doesn’t seem to require them or at least doesn’t advertise the vacancies. There certainly are vacancies though, but what happens in some shops is that the queues just get longer and longer. Even in normal times, we have twice abandoned our trolley in Leclerc after seeing a 45 minute plus queue for all the checkouts; I wouldn’t even consider going there at this time of year.

Other services similarly slow to a crawl. The French post office received orders from Amazon on December 12th yet hadn’t managed to deliver them by December 23rd.

Perhaps you are thinking that the jobs are advertised at the equivalent of job centres? They may be, but it’s not possible to register with those centres over this period as the interviewers in ASSEDIC who are the gatekeepers to these centres don’t seem to turn up for work themselves.

So unlike in the rest of the world, there doesn’t really seem to be much in the way of Christmas employment. Even the Santas just move from their normal office so that’s not even an extra job!