It was exactly a year ago that I went to Audencia Nantes School of Management, France for a week-long study abroad program offered by GWSB MBA. It was a very eventful week for me, and probably one of the brightest highlights of my whole MBA experience. The course that I took there was on Corporate Social Responsibility -CSR, in France, and more generally in Europe. The classes were taught by Audencia professors and we also had a few visits to local businesses where we learned about their specific implementation of CSR.
While the class lectures were on a more general CSR policies and practices, there was one recurring theme in all presentations at the local businesses that was extremely peculiar to me. Whenever the management were talking about CSR at their company, invariably they were talking a lot about management-employees relationship and what the management had done in order to keep their workforce happy and content. It was obvious that this one aspect of the CSR is the most important focal point of companies’ CSR efforts. Also, at every business that we visited they were talking how effective their CSR was, and as a proof at every single business they mentioned how long their company had been going without the workers going on strike. Coming from the US job market and hearing about the strikes and the pride the companies take in being able to avert those was quite unusual.
This was a stark contrast to the CSR emphasis in the US-based businesses, where the focus is more often on the community impact at large, not just the labor, including environmental issues, sustainability, and charity.
Analyzing this narrowly-focused CSR efforts at French companies, one could not help but think about the cost to the businesses and its ultimate effect on the international competitiveness. However, given the subject of the course I took in Audencia, this issue never received appropriate coverage in our classes. There were, of course, some cursory references to the cost of up-keeping the CSR programs, but not in the context of international competition.
A few weeks ago, I read this article Are the French Really that Lazy? It was touching on all these specific aspects of high labor costs and how difficult it is to conduct business in France, especially for someone with a US brand of business management experience. Even though the title of the article is quite provocative, it touches upon some very real hurdles for Multinational Corporations who want to run business in France. The article immediately brought to my memory the last year’s CSR course in Audencia. It was like finally getting a chance to see another side of the coin.
Personally, the most striking part for me in the article was about the power of the trade unions who can dictate their will and manipulate businesses. From the classes I knew that most of that CSR in French companies is regulated by the government requirements, and influenced by the unions, but the article is specifically focusing on the role of the unions.
Now I think that all those presentations and references to the success of the CSR programs that we heard at the company visits in Nantes were dictated not as much by the pride of the management in being proactive in their CSR efforts, but by a pure fear of the unions. Not a good recipe for genuine CSR programs.
Just to give you another point of view on the issue of French “laziness” here is an article from over two years ago that gives a kind of rebuttal to the above referenced article – Are the French a bunch of lazy slackers? Obviously, this article comes from the French source.
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