Percentages, to remember, French labour disputes

Percentages seem to be on the move. One in 10 is the new 10%. The Mirror of 20th May ran the following: “one in seven of all card transactions are now contactless, compared with one in 16 a year ago”. Is this more dumbing down? I must admit to knowing quite a few people for whom percentages are a complete mystery, but I’m not sure if one in 16 is easier to comprehend than 6.25% or a little over 6%.

The French seem to be doing something similar but are also using fractions. This doesn’t seem to be dumbing down because, as you can see in the following quote, they’re using all three methods; not bad really, or are they just confused in their sub-editing: “Près des 2/3 des hommes appartiennent au groupe 1 et 1/3 au groupe 2. Pour les femmes, le groupe 1 rassemble une femme sur deux et l'autre moitié se répartit de façon à peu près équilibrée entre le groupe 2 et le groupe 3. Qu'a donc de si particulier ce groupe 3, dans lequel les hommes n'entrent pas, et qui est loin d'être négligeable puisqu'il concerne près d'une femme sur quatre (23%)?’’

I may give the impression that English is undergoing rapid change in isolation. Not so. French is also changing; the old normative grammar, which used to be so powerful, is under threat. For example, traditionally the French have always made the distinction between “je me rappelle cette personne” and “je me souviens de cette personne”, both meaning “I remember this person”, but there is a grammatical difference, the first uses a direct object, the second an indirect object. Nowadays, it’s very common to hear: “je me rappelled DE cette personne”; it seems that people can’t remember or are not bothered about this difference. But there is an underlying reason. If you want to say to someone: “do you remember me?”, “tu te souviens de moi? Is fine, but you can’t use “se rappeler” in this example, it just won’t work. “Tu te rappelles moi?” or “Tu te me rappelles?” are both not possible, but “Tu te rappelles de moi?” does work, or rather it doesn’t if you want to be grammatical about it. This difficulty is quite clearly described by Maurice Grevisse in his Le Bon Usage, the definitive French grammar, first published in 1936. It’s therefore an old problem which people tut about today as if it were new. It’s worth noting that despite the Académie being Française, Maurice Grevisse was a Belgian grammarian.

In France, the new law aiming to modernise employment legislation, has developed into a real battle with the unions. Refineries are mostly blocked by demonstrators and fuel supplies are not getting through to garage forecourts. There is a very serious risk that the national economy will soon be brought to a standstill. Outsiders find it difficult to understand why such modest changes could lead to this kind of combative reaction. The unions, with possibly one exception, are similar to those in Britain some forty years ago, won’t be pushed about and always ready for a fight. French labour law, in the shape of the Code du Travail, has always given them clout, they have always punched above their weight in defence of their own rights and special interests despite the fact that their membership is nowadays small.

An example of acquis sociaux. Martine Aubry, when Labour Minister in the late 1990s, gave her name to a law which limited the working week to 35 hours. Her theory was that this would lead to a need to hire more people. It didn’t work out like that and no other country in Europe followed France’s example. It is now generally held to be holding back the economy and it is proving extremely difficult to get the unions to budge on this and to move towards a longer working week. Another current issue, Sunday working. The unions are reluctant to sign up to it and because of the way negotiations are structured, nobody seems to ask the shop-workers for their opinion.