From Paris with love

The only full time work I have ever had has been in Paris. The first was in an advertising agency, surrounded by skeletal, terrifying Parisiennes breathing croaky panic onto clattering keyboards. I spent six months staring cross-eyed at spreadsheets, trying to understand the importance of making people buy yet another £15,000 watch and sneaking into champagne receptions with my boss’s unwanted invitations.

I learnt many things from that job: the joys of strong, black coffee in a plastic cup on a hung-over Monday morning, the importance of not addressing the CEO of the company with the French familial ‘tu’ and that the colleague with the loudest phone voice will usually get the deal (apparently through sheer force of volume.) The advertising agency also gave me an insight into the way graduate employment works in France.

The scary Parisiennes were initially shocked and horrified that I was working with them – albeit as an intern – without having first completed a degree in communication. Unless you have studied at a business school or one of the lofty Grande Ecoles, a French degree in itself is not treated as especially important. Instead, courses for most students are focused more on employability than education.

It is not unusual for a degree structure to balance days of lectures with days of office work.Students will do a steady stream of internships – known as ‘stages’ – before leaving university, and most offices have a permanent intern position. Stages are always paid – normally around €400 a month full time – and because there are so many available, are generally more easily obtainable without access to a parent’s contact book.

The grass is not necessarily greener on the Frog side of the Channel, however. Employers are starting to turn down the throngs of Technical and Communication College graduates in favour of students of more general and traditional degrees, such as literature.
A French friend has bemoaned the time and money he is spending studying communication when it looks like the communication job market will not employ him. Students bearing the brunt of contradictions in the higher education system? Doesn’t sound so very different from Britain, does it?

Now, on my year abroad, I am somehow managing to hold down two jobs in Paris, having previously struggled to make my 10 hours of lectures a week at Warwick. Working (unpaid) office hours at an English newspaper, I am also moonlighting as a waitress a few evenings a week. The restaurant work is proving very necessary to ease the costs of Parisian living and my addiction to well-made mojitos, but my first monthly pay check came as something of a shock.

The tax you can claim back with your E45 form for part time work in England cannot be shaken off in France. In fact, of the €9 an hour minimum wage I technically earn, I get to keep about €6. The rest goes on ‘old age insurance,’ ‘unemployment insurance’, ‘insurance against illness’ and several more I have been unable to translate. As a part time student job which I will only have for a few months, the state taking my wages to put towards pensions seems rather unnecessary.

However, in true French style, anything less than a two hour lunch break is considered a breach of human rights and I am encouraged to drink wine with the customers. So you win some, you lose some, I guess…