The government pays parents for having kids-$263 per month for three children, $418 for four. Children in school get their own perks, such as two weeks of Alpine skiing for $60 each.
Public day care costs as little as $2 a day. University tuition is $285 a year (scholarships are available).
Five weeks of vacation is the minimum; many workers get six or seven. Many get a 13th month of pay for Christmas and a 14th for summer vacation.
Laid-off workers receive 60 percent of their pay for up to five years.
A $6,250 stipend is provided for burial costs.
Sound great? The beneficiaries think so, too. “France enjoys the best social-safety net in the world,” agreed 70 percent of those surveyed in a recent poll. While Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were chopping social programs, French President Francois Mitterrand and his equality-minded Socialists were laying on a feast of public-entitlement programs. Today, that rich buffet of benefits is choking the country’s economy. And the voters have finally noticed that the country’s work force isn’t as lean and agile as the competition’s. Unemployment is more than 10 percent and rising. This, polls predict, will produce a massive Socialist defeat in parliamentary elections next Sunday.
What spoiled the party? Essentially, bosses came to view new employees as walking entitlements, so they stopped hiring. Under the Socialists, withholding for perks has grown from 11 percent to almost 20 percent of the average paycheck. Health care takes the biggest single bite. Each employee must contribute 6 percent of his salary while employers chip in an extra 20 percent. For an average worker making $30,000, that means $7,800 in payments for health care alone. A minimum-wage worker costs an employer almost $20,000 a year. So jobs were moved overseas. Because of high salaries, even the French Army no longer buys locally made uniforms. “For one French worker, I could hire 9 Moroccans, 25 Thais, 35 Chinese, 65 Russians or 70 Vietnamese,” says Marcel Albert, whose clothing plant now relies on foreign production.
A new right-wing majority in Parliament would in theory have the power to put France on a diet. But the voters’ appetite for perks is boundless. “Nobody has the courage to attack the real problem,” says economist Maurice Allais, a Nobel laureate. Some conservatives favor laissez-faire economics to create jobs; some want to lower the minimum wage and others propose to float the franc to make French goods more competitive in Europe. Almost nobody dares to hint at cutting the goodies. “If you tell the truth, you can’t get elected,” says Allais. That’s what the two main opposition leaders, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac and former president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, are most worried about. Though the Parliament may change hands, presidential elections are still two years away. Until then, the watchword of French politics is likely to remain: let the good times roll.
