Face to face with his job centre career advisor, who had sent him to train as a crane operator on building sites, former factory worker Thierry Taugourdeau is bitter. “This training is useless! No one is ready to hire us. They ask for experience in building before you can start. They’re taking the mick!” he rails.
It is this very realistic scene that opens the film The Measure of a Man (La Loi du Marché), directed by Vincent Brizé and starring Vincent Lindon, who was awarded best actor at Cannes for his role as the worker.
Although Thierry Taugourdeau is a totally fictitious character, the resemblance to real people and real life situations is disconcerting. So are there 3.5 million Thierry Taugourdeau in France?
“The film paints a sombre social picture. But you have to realise that the situation is in fact sombre,” says Josiane Stamp, head of the unemployed and precarious workers’ committee of the CGT union confederation.
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the number of unemployed persons was under two million, compared with 3.55 million at the end of May 2015, which is over 10 per cent of the active population.
If we add the jobseekers that receive benefits and have a limited amount of work, the figure reaches 5.4 million, an increase of almost eight per cent in a year.
The film is tough on job centres. But so is the latest report published by the French Court of Auditors on 2 July 2015.
The report reveals that job centres are as ineffectual in their mission to gather job offers as they are in providing the unemployed with personalised help and guidance.
The film criticises their inappropriate training and waste of public money. It is an observation shared by Anne Eydoux, a researcher and economist at the Employment Research Centre (Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi - CEE): “The quantitative and field assessments on the various training instruments show that the results are variable but often disappointing in terms of getting people back to work,” she explains in an interview with Equal Times.
But as the head of a job centre, wishing to remain anonymous, argues in their defense: “The job centres cannot be held responsible for mass unemployment. The employees have twice as many cases to deal with than before, which masks the major efforts they are making to be more efficient.”
The problem lies elsewhere. “Job seekers are competing with each other on the job market, which isn’t able to provide enough work. The job centres can do nothing to change that - they try to make the supply meet the demand for work, but they don’t create employment. They leave the competition between job seekers to run its course.
It is perhaps that, first and foremost, which forms the ‘rule of the game’ in the film, explains Eydoux.
Espionage and video surveillance
This same competition scenario between precarious workers is repeated in the film, when the main character finds a job.
Having been hired as a security guard in a supermarket, Thierry Taugourdeau’s boss makes him spy on the cashiers and to convince them to leave when they make minor mistakes.
Once again, the film takes inspiration from real life situations. In 2012, a huge employee espionage system was set up at Ikea France.
In 2013 and 2014, two E. Leclerc retail outlets were nailed by the Commission nationale informatique et liberté (National IT and Freedoms Commission CNIL) for abusive video surveillance of their employees.
“Cameras were filming the employees’ access to their break rooms and some workers were placed under permanent surveillance,” reported the CNIL.
At the end of 2014, the Commission also denounced similar practices at 16 Apple Stores in France.
Video surveillance is authorised in France if the CNIL and the employees have been notified, but only for security purposes, for example, or on the condition that it does not infringe employees’ privacy, be it at their workstation or in their break room.
But it is a rising phenomenon. Last year alone, employees lodged 300 complaints with the CNIL concerning video surveillance systems.
Often those behind the cameras, or other spying operations, are employees like Benjamin (not his real name), who had been unemployed for several months before being hired by GIMAT (Inter-Retailer Test Purchase Grouping) in cahoots with major retailers (Carrefour, Galeries Lafayette, Monoprix, Habitat...).
His role was to play the ’mystery customer’, leaving too much money with cashiers, for example, to catch them out, as AFP reports.
The cashiers caught out, and often reduced to tears, were called into a superior’s office and pressed to confess before the police arrived.
Like his other colleagues employed as mystery shoppers(some for 15 years), Benjamin was paid the minimum wage plus “performance bonuses”.
“Cashiers are thieves,” he was clearly told.
This article has been translated from French.
