Watching the Super Bowl in France

This morning, I watched last night’s Super Bowl. Since it started at midnight here, I wasn’t about to stay up to watch it live, but DVRed it instead. I’m on semi-vacation this week, winding down from several months of a heavy workload, so I spent a couple of hours this morning watching the game.

First, congratulations to the New Jersey Giants (sorry, I can’t consider them to be a New York team). They played a solid game of defense, and that amazing escape from almost getting sacked and the just-as-amazing catch with less than two minutes remaining was stupendous.

But I wanted to talk about the fact that the Super Bowl is on TV in France. This is the second year that it has been live on a public television channel (in previous years it had been on a pay channel). It’s interesting that the French are trying to embrace football (or, as they call it, American football). There are a few amateur teams in France, none of them very good, and, for several years, there was an “NFL Europe”, with teams in a half-dozen European cities. (NFL Europe shut down in 2007.) There was also, for a couple of years, one French player in the NFL. (He got cut before this season.) So it remains a little-known sport, in spite of attempts by the NFL to get better recognition, especially by selling their “NFL Game Day” highlights show to French TV.

During the game, we listeners had to bear the French commentary, which is certainly less experienced than US announcers, though it might have been less annoying (I haven’t seen a football game on US TV in more than two decades, but I assume that the announcers haven’t improved much). We also didn’t get commercials; at least not many. French TV has far fewer commercials than US TV, and notably doesn’t have commercials during shows. For the Super Bowl, there were two or three commercial breaks, but the rest of the time, the US commercial breaks were opportunities for the French commentators to talk; and talk; and talk. They said essentially the same thing at each break, which meant that I simply fast-forwarded when they came on.

This lack of commercials is interesting, especially when comparing sporting events. Soccer, for example, is played without breaks – there are two 45-minute halves in a soccer match. Yet for all the reduced commercials we get here, you actually may see more ads during a soccer match. Soccer fields are surrounded with ad boards, some of them moving, some of them electric, and about 2/3 of all shots on TV include at least one ad. Contrarily, American football is one sport where there are still no ads visible on the field and very few in stadiums. I’ve been astounded to see how many ads there are in baseball games (the quintessential sport for commercial breaks), and find the ads behind the backstop to be the epitome of annoying. Hockey is almost as bad, with ads on the boards. Back in the days when I lived in the US, none of these sports had ads visible when watching TV.

I could rail about Americans accepting so many commercials – 18 minutes per hour for TV series and movies – but that will have to be the topic of another post. At least I got to watch the Super Bowl here with no ads. But the paradox is, being the Super Bowl, I had to go on the web to see the commercials, since it is often a venue for some of the most interesting commercials. Alas, this year was not a good one for commercials, and the game was certainly worth watching.

Letter from France #1: France and the Future of Employment

The French have taken to the streets again, with students, laborers and trade unions demonstrating to complain about a government initiative to make employment more flexible. While these demonstrations, and the violence that inevitably follows them, makes for good television, they mask a more serious problem, one that the French need to understand. The country is no longer able to face the challenges of today, let alone the future, and France’s youth has given up hope.

Whether these demonstrations are in part fueled by political posturing, as the current prime minister prepares for next year’s presidential elections, or whether the students are being manipulated by labor unions concerned about losing entitlements, the situation has become dire. Anarchists routinely follow the demonstrators, vandalizing stores and burning cars amidst powerless police. Worst of all is the neo-fascist attitude of many university students who, in blocking universities as part of their "strikes", and preventing classes from being held for several weeks, refuse to allow a vote on these strikes. More and more university students are trying to get back to school, so as not to miss final exams, but these so-called leftist students, exercising what they see as their right to strike and demonstrate, don’t want to see the excercise of democracy.This is in line with the standard concept of French strikes and demonstrations. For more than two decades, each time a government has attempted to make structural reforms in France, people have gone to the streets, and the government has backed down. Eschewing basic democratic principles, demonstrators assume that getting a few hundred thousand people in the streets will lead to change. Unfortunately, governments, afraid of "May 68" type civil unrest, give in every time, providing demonstrators with the certainty that the next time, things will happen the same way.

The current demonstrations are about a new labor law that will allow employers hiring youths (under 26) to terminate their contract at any time in the first two years. While these employees will have more unemployment benefits than under standard long-term contracts, the students are saying that this new contract is another step toward "précarité", the current buzz-word for non-lifetime employment. Rather than accepting that a job is better than unemployment (people under 26 have unemployment around 22%), they constantly underscore the fact that, with this new contract, it would be harder to get a mortgage or car loan; as if all they want out of life is a new car or a house, and don’t consider their jobs and the experience they’ll amass to be important.

The French have a curious relationship with work. Recent polls have shown that some two-thirds to three-quarters of French youth would prefer a cushy civil servant job, guaranteed for life with good retirement benefits, over other options. While there are entrepreneurs in France, they remain under the radar, and a majority of French university students would never consider taking the risk of starting their own businesses. This suggests that an entire generation is averse to taking risks; not only do they want an iron rice-bowl as soon as they start working, but they don’t want to take chances creating businesses and having more control over their lives.

Yet the backbone of any industrialized nation is small businesses and independant contractors. Even in France, the country that invented bureaucracy, there is a solid fabric of small businesses. Yet these businesses are over-taxed, and taxes progress by levels, meaning that at a certain amount of net income, the taxes increase in a huge leap. Many such businesses and independant contractors don’t want to work more, or make more money, because of their tax liabilitiy. If the French government wants to make a difference, they should start by reducing payroll taxes, especially to small businesses, and allow these employers to hire more easily, with less tax liability.

There’s a trade-off between the tax rates in France and the social safety net. I, for one, am much more secure paying for decent, state-run health care than the second-world equivalent that is the norm in the United States. But retirement benefits, which are among the highest taxes for independant contractors, are unlikely to net very much when I reach retirement age. Add to that a bevy of obscure taxes, many of which were supposed to be temporary when introduced, and the total tax liability is stifling.

France needs to incite more people to take the plunge and start their own businesses. They need to develop more partnerships between universities and businesses so students are not secluded from the world of work, and have a better understanding of what business is about. But above all, they need to teach a generation of complacent youths that it’s time to get up and start working. Not everyone can have that coveted civil-servant job, and competition means that the majority of students who seek an undemanding life will not find it. Perhaps French youth need hope and curiosity more than anything; perhaps the French government needs to give this to them. The future is only what you make it, and, for now, these demonstrators are desperately clinging to the last remnants of the past.

Letter from France #0 – Introduction

I am a native New Yorker who has lived in France for more than twenty years. This gives me a unique perspective on both the United States (as a lapsed American), France (as a foreigner; I’ll never be totally integrated here), and Europe.

Until now, my web site has focused mostly on Macs, iPods, and digital music, since I make my living writing about these things. But you have also noticed articles about books and CDs that I have enjoyed, and a handful of articles that don’t fit in any of my categories, which I have filed under Miscellanea. I will soon be adding a new series of articles, to be posted on an irregular basis, to be called Letters from France.The goal of these Letters from France is to present my opinions on issues other than technology: politics, social questions, and France, a country that interests many people (for better or for worse). In this series, I will present some of the interesting or odd elements of French life and culture, compare France with the United States, look at French food, culture and history, and present my opinion of what life is like in this interesting country. I’ll also look at Europe, and the rapidly-expanding European Union, the latest version of the Old World that is moving ahead in fits and starts. And, finally, I’ll opine, from time to time, on broader political issues having nothing to do with France. These occasional letters will be written as such–epistolary documents, written to an imaginary friend–in an attempt to renew with the lost art of correspondence.

So I’m looking forward to hearing from you, dear readers, as I share my experiences and viewpoints about France. Feel free to post comments or responses to these letters, or to email me if you have any thoughts on my missives.