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Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

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Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#81

Post by AmericanChopper »

jbronn wrote: post #49
keyle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep you've highlighted the main issues here. Kidnapping a CEO because the company isn't making any money and shutting its doors is the culmination of an ultra-unionised population. Don't get me wrong, unions were vital in the 40-70's as there was a clear abuse of the workforce. But today, the workforce can't wrap their heads around how a balance sheet works. And all those social laws make hiring and firing very hard,…

Abuse of the workforce didn't start in 1940 and end in 1979. Some labor innovations you may enjoy: - Weekends (40 hour week) - Minimum wage - No child labor - Workers compensation - Not being massacred by your employer¹ Don't be so glib about the necessity of unions -- the Fair Labor Standards Act was written with blood. ¹ See, e.g. , the Ludlow Massacre, the Thibodaux Massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain.

Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws. In developed economies they only serve as a levelling mechanism, which also make it impossible to fire anybody. The only people they serve are unproductive and incompetent employees.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#82

Post by toomuchtodo »

lurena wrote: post #78

I'll go ahead and be 'that guy' and say it: I don't want my country to become a startup nation. I don't want management methods and labor laws to be reformed, or modernized, or to mimic those in the US. I don't want corporation-friendly tax rates to be enacted. I don't want regulations to be lifted. There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of A…

As an American, kudos for appreciating what keeps your country on solid footing, versus a culture that is essentially a lottery with more flash.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#83

Post by mtremsal »

40something wrote: post #39

Culturally it can’t happen. They need their own version of Trump to erase 3 regulations for every new one. In addition the youth have zero ambition due to the strong safety net.

I'm curious, are you arguing that the US was not a "start-up nation" before Trump's election?

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#84

Post by enraged_camel »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #81
jbronn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abuse of the workforce didn't start in 1940 and end in 1979. Some labor innovations you may enjoy: - Weekends (40 hour week) - Minimum wage - No child labor - Workers compensation - Not being massacred by your employer¹ Don't be so glib about the necessity of unions -- the Fair Labor Standards Act was written with blood. ¹ See, e.g. , the Ludlow Massacre, the Thibodaux Massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain.

Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws. In developed economies they only serve as a levelling mechanism, which also make it impossible to fire anybody. The only people they serve are unproductive and incompetent employees.

Laws aren’t permanent. They can be, and in fact often are, rolled back or abolished. See Glass-Steagall Act and the much more recent Dodd-Frank rollbacks as examples.

The fact of the matter is that when you make progress in an area you can’t just sit back and relax. You have to continue to work hard to prevent regression, especially when there are strong economic pressures in that direction. This is why unions are as important today as they were in the mid-19th century.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#85

Post by Pmop »

charlesdm wrote: post #33
chillidoor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how big the contractor market is in France. I mean, contractors are easy to hire and fire so it could be a good compromise (at least in the short term).

Not living in France, but Belgium (similar market to some extent): 99% of people don't want to work as a contract. They want a long term, "indefinite" employment contract.

Interesting.

Brazilian here. It seems that we have a lot in common.

However, entrepreneurship and self made man/business culture has been getting increasingly popular (mostly at São Paulo) although lawmakers have not been following the trend.

edit: formatting.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#86

Post by Legogris »

Just sharing another experience:

I am a technical manager at a small-size big data company. We opened a new office in Paris three months ago and our largest struggle by far is recruiting talent. Despite what other comments here are writing, the startup scene is booming. Station F[1] is huge. The four WeWorks are full and they are opening two more soon. Global companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Naver are growing their presence. New companies are popping up all the time. Despite the academic strength of France in Computer Science, there is simply not enough supply of senior engineers in France to meet the demand. A couple of years ago Paris was lukewarm and we managed to open up in the midst of frying heat. I have met both Berliners and Parisians who say that there is more happening in Paris than Berlin right now.

The language divide is definitely a thing. We are an international English-speaking company and that works both for and against us.

(We're called Kaiko[1] if anyone reading this wants to reach out and connect)

[0] https://stationf.co/

[1] https://www.kaiko.com

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#87

Post by adventured »

enraged_camel wrote: post #84
AmericanChopper wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are not necessary at all in any country that has decent and enforced labor laws. In developed economies they only serve as a levelling mechanism, which also make it impossible to fire anybody. The only people they serve are unproductive and incompetent employees.

Laws aren’t permanent. They can be, and in fact often are, rolled back or abolished. See Glass-Steagall Act and the much more recent Dodd-Frank rollbacks as examples. The fact of the matter is that when you make progress in an area you can’t just sit back and relax. You have to continue to work hard to prevent regression, especially when there are strong economic pressures in that direction. This is why unions are as…

The perpetual cruft stacking seems to be a far greater problem of passing large laws like eg Dodd Frank. In terms of regulation, the biggest problem the US has, is a century of cruft having built up, and the rarity with which it gets fully removed or even looked at + questioned for whether it should be on the books at all. The perpetual, hilariously absurd expansion of the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations is a nice example of that in action (180,000 pages).

My favorite example, that does a wonderful job of pointing out the absurdity of this endless stacking, is the Twitter account A Crime a Day:

https://twitter.com/crimeaday

Who is going through and removing all of that trash? Nobody, it's perpetually expanding.

They almost never actually remove large bills like Dodd Frank from the system, they stack more cruft forever on top. If you want to roll back a section, you add 20 more pages of cruft to do it.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#89

Post by adventured »

marticode wrote: post #72
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #11

Hiring and firing people in France is particularly hard. Most companies do not scale beyond 10 employees as after this threshold the regulatory burden increases dramatically. Taxes on small to medium businesses are downright confiscatory. Most French people still see business owners as exploiters of their workers.

Corporate tax rate is at 33% and 16% for small business, that doesn't strike me as particularly high, especially considered what it used to be in the US. There are many taxes on employee's but they fund their benefits, so that's something you don't have to provide separately to your employees and you can basically see it as part of the salary.

It was increasingly a problem for US competitiveness. The US was bleeding a lot of successful companies to other countries for tax purposes, and it was getting worse (Pfizer tried to flee to Ireland).

The average national rate in Europe is around 18%, and 21% for the EU.

France is competing with this:

Austria 25%, Spain 25%, Netherlands 25%, Italy 24%, Norway 23%, Denmark 22%, Sweden 22%, Portugal 21%, Slovakia 21%, Estonia 20%, Finland 20%, Iceland 20%, Russia 20%, Poland 19%, UK 19%, Czech 19%, Switzerland 18%, Ireland 12.5%

Armenia 20%, Belarus 18%, Ukraine 18%, Romania 16%, Lithuania 15%, Albania 15%, Moldova 12%, Bulgaria 10%, Hungary 9%

Staying up in the 30s would put France at a severe disadvantage vs the rest of the EU and Europe. Germany will also be forced to lower its rate eventually.

The world average was near 40% ~35 year ago. The rate in the US came close to matching with the world average in the late 1980s. After that, the world average began declining consistently while the US remained high. When the world average is 22% and you're at 35%, you have a problem.

Re: Macron Vowed to Make France a ‘Startup Nation.’ Is It Getting There?

#90

Post by sesutton »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #52
chrisseaton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kidnapping a CEO because the company isn't making any money and shutting its doors is the culmination of an ultra-unionised population. I've heard about 'bossnapping' - is it literally as described? How on earth does this not end in bloodshed? If someone tried to kidnap me I would be immediately fighting for my life. Do the Police do hostage rescue? How are people not getting hurt?

Because it's mostly a stage play. My father was the lead of Human Resources (don't know how it translates in English) in a bank. He was once hold for a night during a strike, with 3 other persons. The union leader told him "It's not you sir, we like you as a person, but it's what you represents that we hold here". So they ordered pizzas and managed to sleep on coaches and were "freed" the next day. No one was hurt. H…

Kidnapping is kidnapping no matter how nice the the kidnappers are.
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