No shit, Sherlock... The City is recruiting the best and the brightest of the French graduates - the ones who don't want to work in the public sector - and a steady stream of very, very capable French men and women in their thirties. All of them maintain that London is creating more jobs for 18-25 year-old French people than Paris; I find that difficult to believe but, after throwing a pinch of salt over my shoulder, I suspect that there is a grain of truth in it; at the top end of the market, their univerities hve been creating longer and longer courses, and their corporations have been extending the subsidised stagier internships, so that a French 'Graduate' is often closer to 30 than to 20, and it all smacks of an effort to massage the graduate unempoyment figures.
Five years ago, before the Poles came over, I am certain that it was true that bright young non-graduates were better off seeking service sector work in London than in Paris. I suspect that this is less true now. However it was and still is true that their welfare system gives very few incentives - if they came here, they were the real self-starters and I'd like to think we've kept them. Certainly, they have unpleasant choices if they remain in Paris: to be 25 and never-employed - and by definition lacking the connections and the small-scale political skills to get into their public sector - is to be permanently unemployed and doomed to a lifetime of revolving-door training and education schemes that are placing people later and later in life, if at all.
Bluntly, the 'exit' or placement rate is lower than the 'entry' rate of new school-leavers at the low end, and of graduates at the top end; the French have fudged this for two decades and are now in the unacknowledged-but-ludicrous situation of having a substantial proportion of the 25-35 year-old cohort in 'youth' training schemes.
I'd like to know exactly how large that 'substantial' number really is, but the figures are very hard to come by. Be warned, you'll find it difficult too, and you'd need a native guide to detect all the fudges - like the 'stagier' internships that notionally replace military service - and the community volunteer schemes in the patriotic inner-city areas. And there's no way of knowing how many of the French public sector workforce are like the Japanese 'window-gazing-tribe' - effectively unemployed but off the books.
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Date: 2007-04-09 11:51 am (UTC)the entire country is screwed
No shit, Sherlock... The City is recruiting the best and the brightest of the French graduates - the ones who don't want to work in the public sector - and a steady stream of very, very capable French men and women in their thirties. All of them maintain that London is creating more jobs for 18-25 year-old French people than Paris; I find that difficult to believe but, after throwing a pinch of salt over my shoulder, I suspect that there is a grain of truth in it; at the top end of the market, their univerities hve been creating longer and longer courses, and their corporations have been extending the subsidised stagier internships, so that a French 'Graduate' is often closer to 30 than to 20, and it all smacks of an effort to massage the graduate unempoyment figures.
Five years ago, before the Poles came over, I am certain that it was true that bright young non-graduates were better off seeking service sector work in London than in Paris. I suspect that this is less true now. However it was and still is true that their welfare system gives very few incentives - if they came here, they were the real self-starters and I'd like to think we've kept them. Certainly, they have unpleasant choices if they remain in Paris: to be 25 and never-employed - and by definition lacking the connections and the small-scale political skills to get into their public sector - is to be permanently unemployed and doomed to a lifetime of revolving-door training and education schemes that are placing people later and later in life, if at all.
Bluntly, the 'exit' or placement rate is lower than the 'entry' rate of new school-leavers at the low end, and of graduates at the top end; the French have fudged this for two decades and are now in the unacknowledged-but-ludicrous situation of having a substantial proportion of the 25-35 year-old cohort in 'youth' training schemes.
I'd like to know exactly how large that 'substantial' number really is, but the figures are very hard to come by. Be warned, you'll find it difficult too, and you'd need a native guide to detect all the fudges - like the 'stagier' internships that notionally replace military service - and the community volunteer schemes in the patriotic inner-city areas. And there's no way of knowing how many of the French public sector workforce are like the Japanese 'window-gazing-tribe' - effectively unemployed but off the books.