French Life-expat France

Well, oldest daughter has just completed her first ‘work experience’ week. She didn’t seem too horrified by the big wide world, and reckoned it beat school hands-down.

She worked in a creche (nursery) with children of pre-school age, which she has always had an affinity with, and it seemed to go OK. One of the children at the creche was from a newly arrived English family, who spoke almost no French, and it gave daughter (completely bilingual and no trace of a foreign accent in either language) great pleasure not to mention she could speak perfect English, as the mother tried to explain with a very limited vocabulary that her daughter’s hat had gone missing.

So I can confirm that she shares my own tormented sense of humour. The week before, at school, she had a student stand-in teacher for English lessons, who didn’t realise she was English, and who begrudgingly admitted that our daughters answer to a question was ‘not bad, and her English accent wasn’t bad either’. That had her worked up, asking in perfect English which part of the phrase or accent could be improved on.

Anyway, back to the creche, they all got appraisals at the end of the week - there were three of them there at the same time. One had a long lecture about how she had done a good job but needed to show more independence, ‘get ready to leave the parental nest’ and so on; the second was told they were perfect for the job, and had adapted very well to all the challenges presented; and the third was told she was completely unsuitable, too aggressive with the children, and generally too noisy and scary to be in the company of small children.

You’ll have to guess which of the three appraisals related to our own daughter, because I’m not telling you.

Also work related but for me this time, we had a half-day induction at the local Chamber of Commerce last week to learn about the opportunities presented by starting a business in France. The opportunities mostly are: the opportunity to pay enormous soocial contributions; the opportunity to fail within three years because the social contributions are so high that it isn’t possible to make a profit; and the opportunity to fill in lots of forms.

The greatest part of the ’social contributions’ (national insurance equivalent, if you are UK based) goes to the state pension fund. I tried to convince them that I already had a pension sorted out, thank you, so could I please not pay several thousand euros a year for a pension I’ll probably never receive, but they didn’t seem too impressed by the idea.

Horrified was the word, as she explained in words of few syllables that if I live in France I must pay for a French pension, like it or not. My efforts at explaining that if I had a pension from one European country surely that was good enough fell on deaf ears. We’re off back there today for another little chat. Registering a business is not optional, unfortunately. It is simply not legal to start a business in France without registering and getting a SIRET number.

There is a lot of talk by politicians in France about encouraging small business, relieving the heavy cost burden, and so on. Unfortunately all this good news hasn’t filtered through to the Villeneuve-sur-Lot office quite yet. And the lady making the presentation didn’t seem to connect that her graph showing the high percentage of business failure in the first three years of business, and the later graph of social contributions in the first three years of business, might in some way be related.

On a brighter note, we sat through the whole presentation without any particular language difficulties. It was kind of strange though, finding myself in an ‘office presentation’ type environment conducted entirely in French, being my first visit to a real office environment since coming to France several years ago.