Macron’s Plan to Get French Youth Onto the Factory Floor

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A 20-foot-tall blue rooster, appearing to crow as it strides forward, chest jutted out and wings folded back, is on a tour de France. The inflatable bird is racing to 60 stages across the country, accompanied by a team of 15 technicians, six trucks, and an Airstream trailer. The mission: to restore pride in the country’s manufacturing industry.

Each daylong stage of the so-called French Fab Tour includes workshops and games for schoolchildren, conferences, aptitude tests, virtual-reality experiences, and speed-dating-style job interviews. President Emmanuel Macron’s government is hoping the campaign will encourage the French back onto the factory floor. “We’re in a sector that is the very opposite of sexy,” says Julien Hue, chief executive officer of industrial oil manufacturer Hafa.

Bottlenecks in labor supply are one of the main constraints on growth in the European economy, frustrating the European Central Bank. After slashing interest rates and pumping billions into the economy with quantitative easing, the ECB says the onus is now on governments to do more to bring people into the workforce and equip them with skills businesses need. The French government estimates there are about 50,000 vacancies in manufacturing that, if filled, would create an additional 200,000 jobs.

In other large European economies including Germany and the Netherlands, the problems are largely explained by record-low unemployment. In France, however, unemployment is almost 9%, yet 46% of employers in industry report recruitment difficulties, according to the French statistics agency Insee. That’s the highest level in almost 20 years. Even when unemployment was at 7.2%, in 2008, French manufacturers found it easier to hire than today. “The main problem for our competitiveness comes from the fact that we aren’t able to recruit in industry. And we can’t recruit in industry because its image is degraded,” says Angès Pannier-Runacher, one of the ministers in charge of the French Fab.

In the Normandy town of Rouen, the giant rooster struggled to compete for attention with ships visiting for the annual Armada celebrations in June. Only a handful of people passed through to look at the French Fab exhibits, while thousands queued for hours only a few yards away to visit antique sailboats and modern warships.

The French Fab is attempting a makeover on a national scale—“Fab” evokes both fabulous and the French word fabriquer, which means to manufacture. But it’s not the first time the government has sought to promote business using the rooster emblem, which usually features on the jerseys of national sports teams. In 2013 it unveiled the French Tech initiative and its red rooster to champion startups and digital companies. The government wants blue and red birds to work together, though there are some differences—while the French Tech rooster stands straight with its feet together, French Fab is on the move. “This one is setting off on a conquest,” says Patrice Bégay, communications director at the country’s public investment bank, Bpifrance, which is one of the creators of the blue rooster brand.

Business leaders aren’t convinced the red-blue distinction is useful. Groupe Celec, which designs and makes electronic sensors for faucets and urinals near Rouen, struggles to recruit engineers for research and development because young talent would rather work for companies under the French Tech umbrella, says Chairman Michel Fardo. Even his three children don’t want to follow him into the family business. “This generational digital aspect really penalizes us,” he says.

To address that, much of the French Fab Tour focuses on trying to capture the imagination of young people. Organizers usually arrange for schools to visit the stages, where students can put on VR headsets to explore what it’s like to be a robotics engineer, an aeronautical welder, or a digital developer. They can also take aptitude tests used by recruiters and try to crack enigmas in an escape game themed around modern industry. To reach a broader public, the tour will go to beach resorts in August; it hopes to have targeted half a million visitors by the time it concludes in Paris in October.

Overcoming young people’s aversion to manufacturing may require more than challenging a preference for tech. Business leaders gathered at the tour stop in Rouen also blamed strategic decisions made decades ago that encouraged French youth to pursue academic studies, while in Germany the government chose to support and promote apprenticeships and professional training. When Jean-Paul Lecerf took over his family’s heating and air conditioning company, Sovimef, in 1983, workers had the skills and aptitude for the job and stayed longer, he says. Now, as he prepares to hand over control of the business to his sister and another venture, he says the company faces “severe” difficulties hiring. At the speed job interviews in Rouen, he received about a dozen résumés but discarded half of them because the potential candidates showed no aptitude or motivation. “Forty years ago, manual work was something natural and industry was everywhere,” Lecerf says. “But, bit by bit, people wanted their children to do better than them.”

The government is taking steps to put less emphasis on encouraging students onto academic paths. But businesses also need to make an effort to adjust their expectations, says Martine Chong-Wa-Numeric, the director of unemployment office Pôle Emploi in the Normandy region. Companies should take more risks by hiring people without skills and training them on the job, she says. “It’s really a deep transformation of society that is needed, a change of mentality. We need time, but at the same time, we don’t have time because the businesses here need to hire now.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Silvia Killingsworth at skillingswo2@bloomberg.net, Fergal O'Brien

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.