I recently finished watching season one of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, in which — spoiler alert — a Midwestern marketing professional named Emily moves to Paris for her job at a firm called Savoir, battling culture shock as she settles in. Her life abroad is rife with limitations, not least a language barrier, but it offers new freedoms too. To her boss’s chagrin and the firm’s benefit, she provides an American perspective for clients. Living in such a content-rich city, she becomes a successful Instagram influencer. And, underpinning this whole experience, she enjoys various benefits that she would lack under American labor laws and at-will employment.
The show often makes fun of differences in the French workplace, starting with one of Emily’s first days, when she arrives early to find Savoir’s office empty. “I’ve been here since 8:30,” she frets to an arriving coworker. “Pourquoi?” he responds. “We open at 10:30.”
It’s fun for us Americans to needle the French for enjoying more leisure time, with their plentiful vacation days and what is at least on paper a 35-hour workweek. Like plenty of cultural differences, this leisure gap can be traced not to random chance, but to institutional arrangements: a 2005 NBER paper makes a convincing case that “European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued ‘work less, work all’ explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe.”
Later on, in the season one finale, Emily’s boss gets fed up and says to her: “You are fired. Get out of my office, clear out your desk, don’t show your face here ever again.” Mournful strings and piano swell in the viewer’s ears. This strikes a chord with American audiences familiar with the system of at-will employment common in non-unionized workplaces, which allows employer or employee to terminate their relationship for a whole host of reasons and with relative ease. But we soon breathe a sigh of relief when Emily’s coworkers explain to her that “it’s impossible to fire someone in France.”
When Emily shows up at work the next day, her boss asks her why she’s here. Egged on by a coworker, Emily calls the bluff. “I have outstanding clients,” she explains in an inspiring, albeit halting, assertion of her rights as a worker in France. “Until the paperwork is filed, I still have a duty to them and to Savoir.” In that paperwork, the company would need to prove a “just cause” for firing Emily, which is not as simple as merely claiming that she was incompetent or annoying to work with. For the time being, she is still an employee of Savoir — and promptly finds a way to win her job back, a plot line brought to you by the generosity of French labor law.
Is that all? Non. It’s important to note that from the moment she arrives in Paris, Emily has lived a financially comfortable life. (To say interpersonally comfortable would be a stretch.) The first friends we see her make include a nanny from a preposterously rich background, and the heiress to a champagne fortune. Her job puts her in contact with powerful businesspeople and an eccentric, iconic fashion designer. The splendor-drenched galas she attends make clear that Emily’s Paris is a glamorous one.
Yet she is still a worker, not a boss, and benefits from strong employee protections all the same. Employees across professions and class divides are covered by these labor laws.
In his classic work, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen argues that part of the reason for the success of Nordic countries’ generous social-democratic welfare regimes is that they “provid[ed] benefits tailored to the tastes and expectations of the middle classes.” Welfare programs gather political inertia when they provide a large swath of people with tangible, life-improving benefits, creating loyalty and solidarity among these beneficiaries.
In the event that Emily ever returns to the US (which I guess probably won’t happen given the show’s whole, uh, raison d’être), one might imagine that her experiences working in France would have engendered within her a newfound appreciation for worker-friendly regulations, and perhaps some increased empathy with those whose jobs do not provide them with a gorgeous, fully furnished apartment in the heart of Paris.
Can we describe French labor laws as “worker friendly” if they’ve led to one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe, abysmal labor force participation rates, and a considerably (30%) lower standard of living compared to the US?
If these kinds of regulations strangle businesses, harm wages, and cause unemployment, in what sense are they even “worker friendly”?
They certainly aren’t friendly to those unemployed workers, or to the workers who don’t see pay/productivity increases, or to the workers who cannot benefit from business creation because it’s so goddamn costly to start a business in France.