Along a bend in the Seine stand some unusual buildings, which if you look closely you will see are in the shape of tall, open books. This is the enormous Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France).
Not only does it house huge numbers of books, print and digital media collections, the National Library is also the venue for summer talks on different topics, open to anyone who is interested. This year, the theme is ‘the interdependent economy.’ I happened on a session about a printing business employing the long-term unemployed. It sounded intriguing, and could shed some light on what an ‘interdependent economy’ might mean. I joined the small audience to see what it was about.
The speaker, Brigitte Ogée, was the Director of Alpes, which employs a handful of specialists working in the printing business, with the remaining staff being recruited, often via social security agencies, from the long-term unemployed. In Paris, with its increasing unemployment rate and social dislocation, it is part of a scheme to help people back into the workforce by providing them with a one to two-year training program and a wage.
The company prints business cards, stationery, brochures and booklets using large machinery, and has managed to do this with a profit of millions of euros while training people who have lost contact with the workforce, and often with society as well. As Mme Ogée pointed out, ironically enough, more than half of the recruits are not literate, so the organisation also provides training during work hours to redress this, treating it as a professional development issue rather than one of personal weakness. Many recruits have health problems, including mental health issues, and also need support to find stable housing – as she also pointed out, it is hard to attend work when you don’t know where you will spend the night. Some employees have accommodation, but for many it is only temporary, such as living with relatives in overcrowded flats. One employee had lived for four years with his partner in a space of eight metres squared (and I thought our apartment of thirty four metres squared was very small). The company is paid extra by the Government to help address these barriers to work.
The talk is revealing of how a printing business operates. Did you know that an industrial-scale paper slicer costs 30,000 euros (around $A51,000)? In terms of wages, the recruits are employed full-time, each paid 950 euros (around $1,600) per month, the market wage for such work. Mme Ogée didn’t know how you can survive in Paris on such a wage. Nor do I.
The audience is drawn in to this hidden world, and asked lots of questions. Is there a quota on the intake of men versus women? How many find work at the end of the two years? (it’s eighty percent). Do they all go on to work in other printing businesses? What are the biggest challenges, and how do these differ from the challenges in a mainstream printing works?
Mme Ogée noted that it is a workplace much like any other, in that there are personality differences, squabbles about colleagues and tensions brought about by racism. She noted that racism is a big issue in the workplace in Paris.
I thought of two questions, but had to leave before I could ask them. They were:
1. What would you do if you were a politician and had the power to make any decisions in this field, which had an impact on your work? and
2. I have a theory that there is no such thing as laziness, but rather that what someone might call ‘lazy’ is just a lack of motivation for often valid reasons, which society should address. I wondered what the speaker would think of this.
And the term ‘interdependent economy’? I think it is jargon for ‘a world for everyone’, in which we all have an opportunity to improve the world for others, no matter what our field, ideally with support from the Government to remove the barriers to our doing so.
A thought-provoking concept. In fact, I was surprised that a talk about a printing company could leave such a strong impression.
