A 23-year old student was found dead Sunday in a lake in Saulxures-sur-Moselotte, in the Vosges mountains.
The gendarmes recovered the young man's body after a search that mobilized men and a helicopter. The coroner is conducting an autopsy to determine the precise circumstances of death.
But the general outlines are already known: the deceased was one of about a hundred students who took part in the Nancy dental school's integration weekend.
What's an integration weekend? It's a semi-official, school-sanctioned, student-run effort to incorporate entering students. It can be a lot of fun.
It can also involve binge drinking. I suspect that heavy drinking played a big part in this death, because the deceased was not himself a dental student, which suggests that he sought out the event.
Integration weekends can also involve hazing. In France, hazing traditionally involved the entire incoming class of professional schools –medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering– and military academies. After a 1998 law outlawed hazing, initiation practices were reformed and became integration weekends. Of course, abuses still occur. Hazing doesn't seem to be an issue ere, because the deceased was not a dental student.
This having been said, binge drinking and hazing deserve to mentioned together because in both cases authorities –schools, law enforcement and the courts, parents and student leaders– have turned a blind eye to them. Deaths are ruled accidental, living victims are deemed to have gone through something totally exceptional and rarely speak up.
Seen on the streets of Paris: the likeness of French president Sarkozy, depicted in the style Sheperd Fairey used for the Obama campaign. It’s Sarkobama, and it’s back.
The setting is a curbside sign instructing masters to pick up after their dogs.
At the bottom of the sign, a sticker. It shows Sarkozy’s likeness, and its caption reads “yes we lie”, in English.
We can safely assume that the sticker’s author is not a Sarkozy fan.
According to the World Health Organization, France suffers from a suicide rate higher than its neighbors: 17.6 suicides per 100 000 inhabitants. French men are more likely to take their own life (26.4 per 100 000) than French women (9.2 per 100 000). These are sad and sobering figures, and the fact that France outpaces its neighbors suggests that suicide prevention should be (even more of) a public health priority in France.
France Telecom, privatized in 1998, has more than 100 000 employees in France. In 2000, 28 of its employees committed suicide. Since the beginning of 2008, 23 France Telecom employees committed suicide, and another 13 attempted suicide.
One could reason that, although each individual suicide is tragic, the overall suicide rate among France Telecom personnel is not unusual. But no one is taking that position in France.
French media and conventional wisdom instead point to a suicide wave at France Telecom. After its privatization, France Telecom changed from a state-owned bureaucracy to a profit-oriented business. Its underlying businesses also changed dramatically, as the ascendancy of mobile communications and Internet access demonstrates.
French labor minister Xavier Darcos called in France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard for a serious discussion. Afterwards, they held a press conference announced measures that France Telecom would take.
Without minimizing the gravity of suicide or trying to find fault with France Telecom’s response, an opportunity to communicate has been misspent:
- France Telecom “decided to immediately put in place a
freephone number to promote dialogue. Psychologists from outside the
company will be available to listen to and talk with any employees who
may be having difficulties”. This might be an obvious initiative for a phone company, but it seems to me impersonal (a phone chat with someone “from outside the company”, not a personal meeting or a course of therapy) and guilt-inducing (because the focus is on “difficulties” that employees “may be having”).
- The overall approach is bureaucratic, institutional, collective. For example, employee representatives will appoint an external consultancy to conduct an audit of the situation within France Telecom.
- At the press conference, Lombard said that he wanted to put “a halt to this suicide trend [or fashion] which, obviously, shocks everyone”. (In French: point d’arrêt à cette mode de suicide qui, évidemment, choque tout le monde).
- I’m troubled, because these remarks could be heard as suggesting greater concern with “everyone’s shock” than with suicidal employees.
- Many were shocked by Lombard’s description of a suicide trend or fashion (the French word Lombard used is “mode“). In official communications, France Telecom talks about “recent events” and a “series of suicides”. Lombard later said (in French), “By mistake, I used the word ‘mode’, which was the translation of the word ‘mood’ in English.” Really?
I wonder whether people haven’t misunderstood the organizational behaviors involved. Conventional wisdom has it that employees have been put under greater stress since privatization. What I’d suggest is quite different: the world and France Telecom’s business have change, but France Telecom’s management style hasn’t. All of the above suggest to me a top-down, hierarchical, bureaucratic organization, much as you’d expect from a public utility in a highly regulated business, but at odds with our increasingly “flat”, horizontal, democratic society.
French postal workers have been striking this week.
They oppose the possible future privatization of the (state-owned) French post office. More generally, they fear that a profit-seeking mentality will worsen life for postal employees and customers alike.
I’m open-minded when it comes to these arguments, but categorical that the timing is wrong, at least ten years too late. What the post office is and does has changed over the past decade, so much so that I suspect the strikers really are mourning a remembered post office from the past.
Like post offices elsewhere (especially in the USA), French post
offices historically have been drab or dour. Over the summer, workers remade my neighborhood post office. Here’s what it looks like today:
- There’s a welcoming banner that reads, “The Postal Bank invites you to discover property Loans”. French post offices have long offered banking services. But today, financial services are center-stage. The post office is a bank that happens to sell stamps. The post office apparently has no reticence in promoting mortgages.
- There’s a central presentation stand that displays merchandise on offer: books, phone cards, gift cards.
- Postal services are set aside along the periphery of the boutique. It’s easier for a customer to reach a vending machine than a person behind a counter. The mailbox is outdoors.
Under European regulations, the French post office, like most of its neighbors, will soon face competition for delivery of letters under 50 grams (1.75 ounces). Competitors will enter this market in France in 2011.
Competitors have not been idly passing the time. They’ve been gaining experience, profiting from exceptions and loopholes in regulations applicable today. An example is presented by a mass mailing sent to my spouse by the Paris area transit authority, a non-profit public service. As the picture (below) shows, there’s no stamp on the envelope. It was instead “distributed by Alternative Post” (red arrow added). In the place of an address, there’s a geographic code; therein lies the loophole that enables the delivery service to distribute letters under 50 grams.
French dairy farmers are upset. They’ve gone on strike to seek higher milk prices.
This being France, there’s not a number in sight. What price do dairy farmers receive for a liter of milk? How has that price changed over time? How does that price compare among other European countries, or with milk producers outside Europe? The data certainly exists, but it’s not discussed in public debate.
Political theater, on the other hand, is often discussed. Striking dairy farmers have a dilemma: what to do with the milk that the cows produce? Some farmers just dump production. Others use milk to irrigate fields.
The Peasant Confederation (Confédération paysanne) had another idea: distribute “the milk of peasants’ wrath” (as their flyer puts it) to Parisians, for free.
The distribution was held today, at noon, at the place de la République. I stopped by. Here’s what I saw:
- A milk truck, with 22,000 liters (5,811 US gallons) of milk;
- A handful of Peasant Confederation people, looking more Parisian than peasant, and sporting t-shirts that read “another world is possible … let’s make it so”;
- A few hundred people eager for milk, pushing and shoving to reach the distribution point;
- No more than 4 police officers;
- At least a hundred media representatives: journalists, photographs, sound recorders, videographers, assorted technical people, also pushing and shoving.
- A political poster, with the slogan “we’re not going to let ourselves be milked any more”, that depicted a globe with teats, being milked by a dairy farmer on a stool, who in turn was being milked by a guy in a suit sitting in a swivel chair, who himself was sitting atop another world, with the likeness of George Washington –from the one dollar bill– at its center.
I didn’t hang around to get free milk. I was put off by the pushing and shoving and overall feeling of pandemonium. And I was put off by Peasant Confederation admonitions: “you must keep the milk chilled, boil it, and consume it within 48 hours.” These instructions show perfectly the tension between the natural goodness of farm-fresh milk and the possible dangers of unpasteurized milk.
