” On both the French left and right, by contrast, political leaders implicitly accepted high unemployment as a price for giving those in work more security and higher wages.”
The Economist France’s labour code, a fat red doorstop of a book, runs to 3,809 pages, 45% longer than ten years ago. The collective-bargaining agreement for hairdressers alone covers 196 pages. “The key challenge”, concludes a recent survey of France by the OECD, a Paris-based think-tank, “is to reform the labour market to promote job…