Paul from Paris

I had a real jolt while reading Tom Friedman's latest column in The New York Times.

Friedman wound up a piece of educational attainment and economic health with some comments on Teach for America. This organization recruits recent graduates from good schools and sends them for a two-year stint teaching in high-need areas. This is a worthy aim.

What caught my eye was Friedman's report that TFA applications are up 40% over last year (itself a record year, with 24,700 applicants for 3,700 spots). At Princeton, 15% of the graduating class has applied; at Yale, 16%.

I love teaching and wouldn't want to cast stones at those who take on this challenge. But I'm uncomfortable with TFA's booming popularity:

1. More than anything else, don't the numbers suggest a herd mentality and a thirst for competition? A herd mentality, because this option has suddenly found favor with large numbers. Thirst for competition, because winning a teaching spot with TFA is improbable: 15% of applicants last year secured a position.
2. Because of the competitive admissions, TFA looks good on a résumé. I expect a spike in TFA alums among law school applicants in two years' time. Lehman isn't hiring this year, the finance sector is under a dark cloud: teaching suddenly looks solid, and respectable. The TFA "brand" is well-known, and respected.
3. According to TFA's figures, teaching compares favorably with other job options open to graduates. Financially, it's not a hardship post.
4. The TFA program is structured. There's an entry point and an exit. There's also training and support.

In addition to good news about TFA, I'd like to read more reports of young graduates who march to a different beat and who make opportunities for themselves, especially in smaller businesses and entrepreneurship.

Among the odd details that catch my eye are this: historic French elevators –with ironwork outer doors and inwardly folding, windowpane cabin doors– that seem absurdly cramped for more than a single passenger, sometimes even bearing traces of a long-gone elevator operator, outfitted with an ashtray.

An ashtray! At one time in France, people smoked in the elevator. And in this long-ago time, the practice was considered so ordinary or expected that elevator manufacturers included ashtrays in their cabins.

Times have changed.

Smoking has been outlawed in the workplace, restaurants and cafés, bars and nightclubs, and public places generally. And French people follow the rules, for the most part.

Taxes on tobacco products have climbed steadily over the years, pushing the price of a pack of cigarettes above five euros.

Tobacco advertising has been prohibited on, and has disappeared from, television, radio, print, or billboards. French law basically prohibits advertising that promotes tobacco, directly or indirectly.

The French press has been agitated this week over recent decisions by Metrobus, which manages advertising for the RATP, the Paris transit authority. As anyone who has ever taken the Paris métro can attest, Metrobus manages a huge quantity of advertising space, much of it below ground.

Two decisions made the news. The first concerned an ad for a retrospective of French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. The poster originally showed Tati smoking a pipe. At Metrobus's request, the pipe was replaced by a whirligig (a children's toy). The second involved a poster for "Coco avant Chanel", a biopic starring Audrey Tautou that opens this week. Metrobus asked that the poster, showing Tautou (as Chanel) with a cigarette, be replaced by another image, sans cigarette. In both cases, Metrobus said that it made its decisions not to run afoul of a prohibition on indirectly promoting tobacco.

From the indignant tone of the media coverage, you'd think that the Paris transit authority was handing out free packs of cigarettes to pre-teens. Many commentators have decried the decisions as absurd or stupid. Others have enlisted the parliamentarians behind the ad ban (some twenty years ago) to explain that this wasn't at all what they meant.

I'm puzzled by the outrage. What's wrong with Metrobus having standards and practices, and refusing certain advertisements?

And I can't help but wonder whether the organizers of the Tati retrospective or the makers of the Chanel biopic aren't secretly happy about the indirect publicity (for their offerings, not for tobacco).

A nation of shopkeepers.

With these words, Napoleon is said to have summed up the English.

I sometimes think of the French as a nation of innkeepers.

A recent poll, done by Opinionway for Le Figaro Magazine, reports that 79% of French people surveyed –nearly four out of five– want to change their lives. With a photo of a happy-looking couple and their four young children in front of an impressive Provençal dwelling, the magazine goes on to describe how French people want to: leave the big city for the country; trade in corporate jobs for small-business ownership.

The archetypal (most dreamt of?) pathway of change leads to a country inn, or bed and breakfast. The Figaro Magazine reports that one thousand people (more likely: a thousand families) start such establishments every year.

In the popular imagination, this adventure involves:

• a well-financed renovation of a historic property; the installation of a well-appointed swimming pool seems de rigueur;
• an expression of the owners' (especially Madame's) excellent taste: antiques spotted at country markets, luxury linens, paintings by artists local or exotic, a table fashioned from wood planks salvaged from a ruined church or old boat;
• a fantasy of offering hospitality to guests, all of whom will express admiration, none of whom will make demands of any sort; innkeeping is described as easy on the nerves.

In France, there are television programs that showcase country inns. Like architectural magazines, most of the programs show the premises vacant of any guests.

It seems taboo in France to discuss how these places are managed or marketed. This is what gets to a national character trait: the requisite management skills are taken for a given, and passed over.

I commented earlier this month on the odd practice in France known as sequestration, where employee activists hold executives hostage. This occurs only at companies where labor-management relations are tense, for example when layoffs or plant closings are announced.

At Caterpillar France, employees held five managers for a day and occupied a plant. In response, Caterpillar France brought suit against employees for "obstructing freedom to work" (entrave à la liberté de travailler) and wrongfully occupying the plant premises; a court Grenoble granted injunctive relief last Friday.

On Sunday, the French ministry for the economy called labor and management to Paris, where at the end of the day they agreed on a "end of conflict protocol", now put to a vote among Caterpillar France workers.

What do I see here? A series of mis-steps along a path from bad to worse. Here's why:

1. If employees are sequestering managers, then either labor-management relations have broken down, or activists want to make an example of the employer. In either case, an employer suit only aggravates the problem.
2. Recent polling shows that most French people sympathize with employees who sequester executives. In the court of public opinion, I don't see how Caterpillar France could win this case.
3. Last Friday's court ruling, I'd argue, is misleading: it superficially favored the employer, but pushed the government to act so that the judgment would not be enforced. And I can't imagine that Caterpillar France really wanted the evening news to lead with scenes of police forcibly removing workers from their factory. The government certainly didn't want to put the police in that position.
4. By allowing the conflict to deteriorate to the point where it became political, labor and management were, I would argue, themselves sequestered in Paris. Of course, they were not forcibly detained. But I'm sure that tremendous pressure was applied so that an agreement issued from the meeting. Maybe the authorities imposed it or encouraged it strenuously; whatever the case, it most likely was not born of labor-management discussion alone.
5. This is precisely what troubles me most: presenting a political solution as a private agreement. There may be a lesser-of-evils merit to the solution now on the table, but the end result will still be the loss of hundreds of jobs, at considerable cost to the employer.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "more than 3,000 lawyers have been laid off in the first three months of 2009," at large law firms in the United States. The New York Times reports that on large New York law firm is offering its associates one-third of their base salary not to come to work and to take a year off.

For up-and-coming lawyers, these are my thoughts:

1. Big-firm practices are here to stay. The fortunes of individual firms will evolve, but the practice style will continue for the foreseeable future. If they fit your skill set and expectations, persist.
2. If you have a genuine affinity for a practice area (a substantive area of law, not to be confused with a practice style), consider employers other than big firms that historically hired lots of associates.
3. If you've previously worked mostly in one industry or business activity (such as securitization deals), consider how these skills or experience can be carried over to other industries or activities; the question is about portability.
4. I'm extremely skeptical of lawyers who suddenly –today– discover an interest in moving in-house or to another practice style. Practicing in-house or for a non-profit demands a skill set as particular as big-firm practice. Experience earned at a big firm may be a plus, or it may not. A transition should be carefully thought out and implemented carefully; it should not be dictated by immediate or feared layoff announcements. (If a layoff is announced tomorrow, to know whom to call and where to send a résumé, I'd turn first to trustworthy partners and law firms encountered in past work.)
5. All lawyers, everywhere and always, have an interest in developing their skills, including the skill of self-presentation. This is especially true in a downturn.

I'm still waiting for reporting on law firm partners whose practice, built up painstakingly over years, has been wiped out by the economic downturn. I suspect that these will be the real casualties.