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Tired of delays in getting orders filled, Pierrick Haan, CEO of Dupont Medical (not to be confused with chemical company DuPont (DD)), decided last year t

Tired of delays in getting orders filled, Pierrick Haan, CEO of Dupont Medical (not to be confused with chemical company DuPont (DD)), decided last year to return production of some wheelchairs and medical equipment to France. The 150-year-old company, based in Frouard in eastern France, created 20 jobs making custom devices at a French plant—and will stop there. Faced with France’s stifling labor code, Haan probably will send any additional production of standard equipment to what he calls “Near France”—Tunisia, Bulgaria, or Romania. “The cost of labor isn’t the main problem, it’s the rigidities,” Haan says. “If you make a mistake in your hiring plans, you can’t correct it.” The cited reason for moving production back to France (from where?) is production delays, which is safer than admitting quality problems. The company is based in France and the fact that it had to move its manufacturing back to France constitutes an admission that the French workers are more productive than the previous batch of non-French workers. The manufacturing jobs that this company is going to create in what Haan ludicrously refers to as "near France" (developing economies where labor is much cheaper -- but Haan isn't chasing cheaper labor, oh no) will be lower-skilled and/or that the resulting products will be labeled "Made in France" because those twenty workers in France were made to breathe on them or affix stickers to them at some point?

DrJokepu 14y ago
I think you really misunderstand this. I did work as a junior mechanical engineer in both French and Eastern European manufacturing plants, small and large. In my experience, labor is equally or even better skilled in Eastern European countries than in France. Since we're talking about trained workers, not qualified professionals, productivity is much rather a function of the skills of the management than the skills of the workers. Generally, small ateliers is France can be more productive than the large factories of companies such as PSA Peugeot Citroën. I have noticed no such correlation in Eastern European factories.
- briandon 14y ago
  Since the workers in both shops were, as you say, equally skilled, what was the wage differential between the French and Eastern European workers performing equivalent jobs. They weren't being paid the same wages, were they? I'm doubtful that the workers in the Eastern Euro locations truly were as skilled as their French counterparts because I have heard the same said by suits w/re to US workers and workers in various parts of the Far East and have had the opportunity to visit manufacturing locations in both and it never turned out to be the truth. Also, with regards to productivity of an enterprise being a function of the management, I would say that poor management is certainly capable of driving worker productivity into the ground but that the most can-do, gung-ho managers in the world cannot do much with low/un-skilled workers.
  - DrJokepu 14y ago
    In France, full-time contracted factory workers get paid the SMIC (minimum wage), which is currently around €1400 per month. There are various ways to hire workers for lower wages, such as summer interns, who are typically only entitled to the third of the minimum wage. Similarly, Eastern European facilities typically pay workers the local minimum wage, which is in the range of €200-600, depending on the country. It sounds like you're pretty convinced that non-western workers are less skilled so there's no point me commenting on that, but I'll try. People want to be doctors, engineers and lawyers, not lathe operators or metal workers. Training low skilled labour is really not that difficult, it's just that in more developed economies anyone who's at least a bit good at anything has the opportunity to find a better career, which is not necessarily true in less developed countries. In those countries, more skilled or competent people end up doing manual jobs simply because of the lack of opportunities. Managing low skilled labour is very different from managing highly qualified professionals. These workers (whether French, Bulgarian, American or Chinese) typically can't work independently in an efficient manner and need constant supervision and micro-management, that's what foremen are for. Basically, if you want your factory workers to be productive, you have to run your factory as a Nazi labour camp. (This is obviously an exaggeration but you get my point.)
    - briandon 14y ago
      Ultra-skilled workers in developing countries tend to make their way to developed countries in order to earn more. That leaves low/un-skilled workers behind. Both Romania and Bulgaria have been in the EU since 2007 and in two more years (2014) workers from those countries will be able to work in France without a permit. Romanian and Bulgarian workers can already work in many other Eu countries without those permits, so how many highly-skilled workers do you really think there are just kicking around in their home countries waiting for someone to come in an employ them at a wage much, much lower than they would earn if they took a train ride to another, neighboring EU member state? In other words, so much for the idea of teeming masses of highly-skilled workers in low-wage countries clamoring to be underpaid. That leaves us with the low-skilled, unmotivated workers who, as you said, need to driven practically like slaves (and worked much, much longer) to approach developed-world levels of productivity. That doesn't sound very alluring.
swombat 14y ago
Please don't post 3 separate root comments replying to the same story, making it look like there's a lot of people agreeing with you when there are not. Instead, edit your comment to add updates.
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  His three comments address three separate points. If he put all 3 points into the same comment, then it would make the subsequent reply thread much more difficult to follow.
  - swombat 14y ago
    They all have the same faintly fanatical tinge of opposition to whatever specific point the article might be trying to say, while disregarding the overall message.
    - briandon 14y ago
      No, you are mistaken again. I am quite clear on the overall message of the article. I think you get the point of it as well but you're intelligent enough to not bother trying to defend the indefensible, so you complain about me and ad-hominem me as a fanatic. The gist of the article is that many French business owners are willfully weaseling out of meeting their social obligations as set forth in the laws of the society in which they live and run their businesses. There's really no way to put a pretty face on that. It is what it is. It's explicitly stated in the article that the people in question are keeping the headcounts at their enterprises artificially low by starting multiple 49-person companies and, in other cases, by farming out the low-skilled bits of their process to countries with much lower wages and much weaker worker protections specifically because of wage and workplace rule differences. The best justifications that the businesspeople quoted in the article can come up with is that they don't want to have to see their workers' reps every week, that it's a pain to ensure that their HR people are aware of periodic changes in social security witholding rates, and the like. They are eerily silent about profit-sharing, which is one of the responsibilities that they are evading, and evidently none of them had the stomach to try to explain why it would be a good thing for society for them to be able to suddenly lay off large numbers of employees without having to provide any sort of justification.

DrJokepu 14y ago

I think you really misunderstand this. I did work as a junior mechanical engineer in both French and Eastern European manufacturing plants, small and large. In my experience, labor is equally or even better skilled in Eastern European countries than in France. Since we're talking about trained workers, not qualified professionals, productivity is much rather a function of the skills of the management than the skills of the workers. Generally, small ateliers is France can be more productive than the large factories of companies such as PSA Peugeot Citroën. I have noticed no such correlation in Eastern European factories.

briandon 14y ago
Since the workers in both shops were, as you say, equally skilled, what was the wage differential between the French and Eastern European workers performing equivalent jobs. They weren't being paid the same wages, were they? I'm doubtful that the workers in the Eastern Euro locations truly were as skilled as their French counterparts because I have heard the same said by suits w/re to US workers and workers in various parts of the Far East and have had the opportunity to visit manufacturing locations in both and it never turned out to be the truth. Also, with regards to productivity of an enterprise being a function of the management, I would say that poor management is certainly capable of driving worker productivity into the ground but that the most can-do, gung-ho managers in the world cannot do much with low/un-skilled workers.
- DrJokepu 14y ago
  In France, full-time contracted factory workers get paid the SMIC (minimum wage), which is currently around €1400 per month. There are various ways to hire workers for lower wages, such as summer interns, who are typically only entitled to the third of the minimum wage. Similarly, Eastern European facilities typically pay workers the local minimum wage, which is in the range of €200-600, depending on the country. It sounds like you're pretty convinced that non-western workers are less skilled so there's no point me commenting on that, but I'll try. People want to be doctors, engineers and lawyers, not lathe operators or metal workers. Training low skilled labour is really not that difficult, it's just that in more developed economies anyone who's at least a bit good at anything has the opportunity to find a better career, which is not necessarily true in less developed countries. In those countries, more skilled or competent people end up doing manual jobs simply because of the lack of opportunities. Managing low skilled labour is very different from managing highly qualified professionals. These workers (whether French, Bulgarian, American or Chinese) typically can't work independently in an efficient manner and need constant supervision and micro-management, that's what foremen are for. Basically, if you want your factory workers to be productive, you have to run your factory as a Nazi labour camp. (This is obviously an exaggeration but you get my point.)
  - briandon 14y ago
    Ultra-skilled workers in developing countries tend to make their way to developed countries in order to earn more. That leaves low/un-skilled workers behind. Both Romania and Bulgaria have been in the EU since 2007 and in two more years (2014) workers from those countries will be able to work in France without a permit. Romanian and Bulgarian workers can already work in many other Eu countries without those permits, so how many highly-skilled workers do you really think there are just kicking around in their home countries waiting for someone to come in an employ them at a wage much, much lower than they would earn if they took a train ride to another, neighboring EU member state? In other words, so much for the idea of teeming masses of highly-skilled workers in low-wage countries clamoring to be underpaid. That leaves us with the low-skilled, unmotivated workers who, as you said, need to driven practically like slaves (and worked much, much longer) to approach developed-world levels of productivity. That doesn't sound very alluring.

swombat 14y ago

Please don't post 3 separate root comments replying to the same story, making it look like there's a lot of people agreeing with you when there are not. Instead, edit your comment to add updates.

bryanlarsen 14y ago
His three comments address three separate points. If he put all 3 points into the same comment, then it would make the subsequent reply thread much more difficult to follow.
- swombat 14y ago
  They all have the same faintly fanatical tinge of opposition to whatever specific point the article might be trying to say, while disregarding the overall message.
  - briandon 14y ago
    No, you are mistaken again. I am quite clear on the overall message of the article. I think you get the point of it as well but you're intelligent enough to not bother trying to defend the indefensible, so you complain about me and ad-hominem me as a fanatic. The gist of the article is that many French business owners are willfully weaseling out of meeting their social obligations as set forth in the laws of the society in which they live and run their businesses. There's really no way to put a pretty face on that. It is what it is. It's explicitly stated in the article that the people in question are keeping the headcounts at their enterprises artificially low by starting multiple 49-person companies and, in other cases, by farming out the low-skilled bits of their process to countries with much lower wages and much weaker worker protections specifically because of wage and workplace rule differences. The best justifications that the businesspeople quoted in the article can come up with is that they don't want to have to see their workers' reps every week, that it's a pain to ensure that their HR people are aware of periodic changes in social security witholding rates, and the like. They are eerily silent about profit-sharing, which is one of the responsibilities that they are evading, and evidently none of them had the stomach to try to explain why it would be a good thing for society for them to be able to suddenly lay off large numbers of employees without having to provide any sort of justification.