France’s young flock to Britain for jobs

[Strengthandhonour]

France’s young flock to Britain


Matthew Campbell Paris THIS Wednesday Marine Fretel, an intelligent, well-educated young French woman, will board a train to London. She has let her Paris flat, packed a large suitcase and said goodbye to family and friends.
She does not expect to return. Fretel is one of the “Eurostar generation” of French professionals fleeing to London and other cities abroad in the hope of better careers in a land of opportunity.
The farewell parties held each week in Paris are multiplying, and although the government puts a brave face on the exodus, this rush for the exit is an embarrassing symptom of chronic French woes as the country prepares to pick its new president.
A dearth of jobs in France, the world’s fifth largest economy, has turned London, less than three hours from Paris by Eurostar, into an eldorado for young professionals such as Fretel. Friends in London have told her that the British capital, unlike the one she is leaving behind, is a “city of dreams”.

“In France everything is stagnating, all doors are closed; in London, though, they say all possibilities are open,” said Fretel, a fluent English speaker who is planning to stay with a cousin in Kentish Town until she finds the job of her dreams, preferably in the recording industry, of which she has experience.
With a degree in communications from the Sorbonne, Fretel may work as a waitress to make money until she receives the right offer. In France she has had only part-time jobs for the past three years,the last of which was in a secondhand bookshop.
“I sent out hundreds of CVs,” she said, “and all I got was ‘Sorry, we’re not hiring’. In London I’ve already got several interviews lined up in the music industry. I’m sure I will succeed.”
Her description of a faltering, moribund France replacing Germany as the “sick man” of Europe has become a central theme of the election battle between Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative, and the Socialist party’s Ségolène Royal.
While Europe’s economic growth is accelerating, France’s is not. Its unemployment rate of 8.8% is among the highest in the European Union. The problem is particularly acute among under 25-year-olds, one fifth of whom are without a job.
This has produced a sense of social exclusion, particularly among youths of immigrant origin, and all of the politicians agree that something must be done to avoid a repeat of the rioting that shamed the proud nation in 2005. But what?
Both candidates have lamented the “immobility”, promising to put the country back on its feet by addressing issues that have fuelled the biggest migration of French people since persecuted Huguenot Protestants fled France in the 16th and 17th centuries.
An estimated 300,000 French citizens live in Britain, which has the third largest expatriate community after Switzerland and America. There is compensation for France, perhaps, in the influx of older British people who come not to make their fortune in France but to spend it.
But given its current plight, France needs the young and dynamic more than ever and the candidates have promised various measures for luring them back.
Royal, the first woman with a chance of becoming president, proposes £7,000 interest-free loans to aspiring entrepreneurs. She wants to create 500,000 state-funded jobs to get young people into the workforce.
For French exiles, however, the 52-year-old Sarkozy seems the candidate more likely to institute reforms to revive the French job market, judging by the election result overseas. The 40% of French expatriate voters in Britain who backed Sarkozy in the first round of voting was higher than the national figure of 31%, as was the 49% he won in America.
Saying that the French must work more if they want to earn more, Sarkozy, a Hungarian immigrant’s son who sold ice creams to help finance his university studies, has made jobs a big part of his campaign, attacking the 35-hour week and holding up as a model the dynamism of les rosbifs.
“In England,” he said on Tuesday night in a speech in Rouen, “nobody can refuse more than two job offers consecutively [and keep their benefits]. If you haven’t got a job after three months, a special counsellor comes along and asks, ‘How is this possible?’ ” In order to encourage more work, Sarkozy has proposed that companies should be excused from paying additional “social charges” on hours worked on top of the weekly quota. Workers should not pay income tax on extra hours, he says.
Yet even Sarkozy, a diminutive figure with a hyperactive personality, has toned down his talk about the need for “rupture” with the past for fear of alienating an electorate whose qualms about capitalism were summed up in an American study in 2005 which showed that only 36% of French people believed the free market to be the best system.
Any effort to reform rigid employment rules that make it virtually impossible to lay off workers without lengthy legal battles and punitive sanctions was expected to provoke the same sort of widespread protest that put paid to a recent government proposal enabling companies to sack workers within the first two years of a job.
The cost of hiring - and firing - workers has driven countless French entrepreneurs across the Channel, among them Olivier Cadic, 45, who set up a successful electronics company in Ash-ford, Kent, a decade ago.
“I’ve seen the word liberty written on lots of French monuments but I had to come to England to actually experience it,” he said last week.
“I love my country, but I don’t have to live there. In France there’s too much taxes, social charges and red tape. Over here you can set up a company in a day. In France it is an incredible ordeal.”
In Testimony, his bestselling book, Sarkozy lamented the fact that even Judith, his stepdaughter, had been obliged to seek work in London because of the shortage of jobs at home. “Britain ceaselessly sucks in thousands of young French people . . . who find it easier to succeed there than at home. How shameful is it that a young person wanting to get on is obliged to leave?”
Cadic was in the front row in January when Sarkozy urged supporters at a campaign rally in London to come home. “We need your work, your intelligence, your imagination and your enthusiasm,” he told some 2,500 escapees, adding: “All over the world I want the French to be proud again.” He promised that if elected, “everything will become possible”.
Cadic, although a supporter, believed Sarkozy was being optimistic. “If he wins, it will take a long time for him to change mentalities,” he said.
Whatever the case, Cadic is not planning to return to his homeland any time soon. Having sold his electronics company for a price he would never have dreamt of a decade ago, he has set up another company that pub-lishes French and Belgian comic strips translated into English.
Fretel, 34, who has never visited Britain before, is just as doubtful about Sarkozy’s chances of reforming France. She voted for Royal for fear that Sarkozy’s reform efforts would provoke mayhem and rioting. “If he wins, I’ll be happy that I am living in London, even if I’m the only one cheering for Royal,” she said.
No French person abroad can claim to be lonely, however. An estimated 2.2m French citizens, about 4% of the population, live overseas. According to the French government, the number registering with French consulates has risen by 40% since 1995.
While many wealthy people flee France for Switzerland or Belgium in search of less punitive tax regimes, the average French expatriate in Britain is aged just 30. Although some end up disappointed, the newly arrived often sound amazed at how easy it is to find a job this side of the Channel.
Vladimir Cordier, a French graduate, found work within five days of arriving at Waterloo on his one-way Eurostar ticket. He was so moved by the experience that he wrote a book about it in 2005 called At Last a Job!
Some French commentators like to laugh off the mass departures as simply an example of the French doing what they enjoy best: exploring the world.
“The French conquest of the world” was how the conservative newspaper Le Figaro optimistically described the great exodus, which it linked with France’s age-old instinct to civilise other countries.
Even so, the government is worried about a brain drain and has quietly introduced programmes to encourage émigrés to return, including cash incentives for talented scientists, fearing that the country, whose 2% growth last year was well behind the 2.7% of the eurozone, could fall even further behind.
It will take much more profound change, however, to bring home people like Olivier Ber-trand, a 32-year-old banker.
“In France it is all to do with connections, who you know,” he said. “That is how people get jobs. Here the only thing that matters is talent. Britain is much more of a meritocracy. That’s what is needed in France.”




source: France’s young flock to Britain-News-World-Europe-TimesOnline