Today in France, the domestic headlines are dominated by what appears to be good news - the unemployment rate in February fell to the lowest level seen in 24 years, 8.4%.
You would think that joy would be unconfined and that M. Borloo who has overseen this steady fall for the past 3 years would be being feted as a national hero. Sadly, as we are in the run up to the Presidential elections in France, and M. Borloo is firmly in the Sarkozy camp, 11 other candidates and interest groups, not to mention the Unions are all kicking up. Their argument is that the figures do not represent reality.
Now the agreed standard method for calculating unemployment across Europe is by survey methods - hence the UK having two main measures - the Government preferred based on the Labour Force Survey, and the Claimant Count, which is based on numbers signing on. The difference is that the survey method includes those who are actively looking for work, but are not entitled to benefits or who have not signed up for benefits.
All surveys include some level of error, and potentially include some bias as well. The Labour Force Survey has been criticised for accessing those that are easy to get to, and missing out others such as the homeless, or those who travel a lot for work, but at a national level, the error rate introduced in this way is small and not significant.
The argument in France currently, is that while unemployment (counted as those actively seeking work of any type, including temping or part time) is going down, and the check figure of employment is also going up, the quality of the jobs is not what it was. It is argued that many are doing jobs that earn less than the minimum wage or are not full time (35 hours per week only in France). In particular, the CGT - the most militant of the unions it seems - say that there are not enough jobs being created, apart from in Construction and my personal favourite, "the nebulous area of personal services".
France is not really ready for the 21st Century at times - in the developed world, job creation will be in services and particularly the personal services, as manufacturing can be done more cheaply elsewhere. However the strangely Seventies figure of Bernard Thibault at the head of the CGT will not go down without a fight. That is one of the biggest problems facing France today.
Just a quick update to the above story - during Friday, Eurostat, the European statistics agency, revised the French unemployment rate to 8.8% for February - no longer such a record low!!
Posted by: Jane Holland | 04/02/2007 at 09:10 AM