Laurent Girard-Claudon
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Laurent Girard-Claudon can tell dozens of such stories. Seven years ago, he started his own recruiting agency in Ireland together with a friend. Approach People, based in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock, now has 14 staffers and has placed a total of almost 1,000 French people in jobs in Ireland, including 300 in 2006 alone. Girard-Claudon says many of his job seekers are either well qualified but lacking in experience — a severe handicap in France — or looking to jump-start their careers in a country where you don't have to be in your 40s to be given management responsibility. Google, Apple and other U.S. technology firms that are hungry for French-speaking talent as they expand their European business usually snap them up.
Back in France, such success stands conventional wisdom on its head. Opponents of change often cite supposedly draconian working conditions and a lack of job security in countries such as Ireland and the U.K. as reasons not to abandon the highly protected French model. Girard-Claudon scoffs at such arguments. "France is frightened of this monster called liberalism, but in Ireland you can't be fired overnight, and if you lose your job you find another one," he says. He surfs the Internet on his office computer to double-check the Irish minimum legal wage. It's $11.10 per hour — higher than in France. But money is a subsidiary issue. Most importantly, "here young people are accepted and welcomed," he says. Even though he was just 23 and lacked experience when he started the company, "I wasn't laughed at, either by the bank or by the authorities," Girard-Claudon says. Ask him if he would have been able to set up his firm in France rather than Ireland and his answer is categorical: "In France I would have been too young."
Other budding entrepreneurs complain of similar obstacles, and worse. Red tape is a good way of strangling entrepreneurial spirit. Benoît Lavaud, a designer who works for a cosmetics company, tried to set up a luxury leather-goods brand in Paris, only to run into massive administrative hurdles. Among other issues, he couldn't understand why French authorities demanded that a start-up with no revenues should pay compulsory pension contributions. Lavaud, 33, left France three years ago for Tokyo, where he has since created his own clothing brand. "Japan is far more welcoming to young entrepreneurs," he says. He's still affectionate about his native country, but he's not likely to return for work anytime soon. "A lot of young people have dreams," he says, "but in France we've lost the energy to turn them into reality."
Then there's the bugbear of discrimination. Yahia Zemoura's problem with France isn't so much his age or his dreams, but his color and his name: he's a second-generation Algerian, now studying in London, whose parents moved to Paris in the mid-1960s. France's failure to integrate its substantial immigrant population is a significant theme of the current election campaign, with all mainstream candidates promising to ease the ethnic tensions that exploded into days of rioting in November 2005 and continue to simmer. In late March, riot police battled about 200 teenagers at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris, prompting sharp political exchanges between the various candidates over who was to blame and what should be done. At the same time, a heated debate has erupted about what it actually means to be French, prompted by a suggestion from Sarkozy that, if elected, he would create a ministry for immigration and national identity. Hamid Senni, who set up his own consulting firm in London, says the rhetoric sounds like "a broken record. Ever since I was born I've heard talk of integration, discrimination and immigration. But the debate is hollow."
Like Senni, Zemoura moved abroad because of what he describes as a poisonous mix of discrimination and a difficult job market. He's 24, a lanky basketball player who passed his baccalaureate school-leaving exam and went on to attend a commercial school in Paris. "I had to get out because I felt claustrophobic. I had so many friends in the same situation: qualified but unemployed," he says. That's not just a feeling: new research by French economists Laurent Gobillon, Harris Selod and Thierry Magnac published in March shows that where you live in the Paris region is a critical factor in whether you'll find a job — and coming from the wrong suburb can quickly disqualify you. Zemoura didn't need to wait for the scientific evidence. In one interview, he says, he was asked: "Is being Arab a problem for you?"