Posted on 02/21/2013 3:17:58 PM PST by 1rudeboy
PARIS (Reuters) - The CEO of a U.S. tire company has delivered a crushing summary of how some outsiders view France's work ethic in a letter saying he would have to be stupid to take over a factory whose staff only put in three hours work a day.
Titan International's Maurice "Morry" Taylor, who goes by "The Grizz" for his bear-like no-nonsense style, told France's left-wing industry minister in a letter published by Paris media that he had no interest in buying a doomed plant.
"The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three," Taylor wrote on February 8 in the letter in English addressed to the minister, Arnaud Montebourg.
"I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!" Taylor added in the letter, which was posted by business daily Les Echos on its website on Wednesday and which the ministry confirmed was genuine.
"How stupid do you think we are?" he asked at one point.
"Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour wage and ship all the tires France needs," he said. "You can keep the so-called workers."
As the leaked letter drew outrage in France, Montebourg penned a scathing response, spelling out the reasons why France routinely ranks as a leading destination for companies to invest, beating China and India in mid-2012.
"Can I remind you that Titan, the business you run, is 20 times smaller than Michelin, the French (tire) technology leader with international influence, and 35 times less profitable," Montebourg wrote, in a two-page letter in French.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Now the only choice is the atheist Chinese?
Is that how Maurice “Morry” Taylor is going to stick it to the country that produced Jeanne d’Arc?
Grrr.. I hate socialist Europe, so I am going to give all of my money to China.
Take a pay cut, protest by opening a plant in North Carolina.
Tell your buddy in Hobby Lobby to stop buying that commie crap too.
If everybody else is just making enough to get by because of Obummer, it’s time that these CEOs start caring about getting Americans back to work and stop going to the Chicom because it’s cheaper.
lol
Let’s have it out: are we offended (in the context of the above story) by the mention of semi-competent American workaholics and the stupid corporate managements that reward them?
How can we be offended when we don’t even know what you are trying to say in that sentence? Why don’t you try reading it slowly and ask yourself if you had not written it yourself would you have any idea what it means? I even showed it to my wife and she at first thought she understood it but then admitted that she really didn’t know what it meant. Maybe I, my wife and ecomcon are all just slow witted?
Run-on sentences are hard, just ask anyone who’s read or tried reading William Faulkner. In mine above, I see one problem - an inconsistency, where I should have listed the same range of hours both times.
I have read a lot of Faulkner but as much as I liked his stories I was sometimes tempted to throw the book in the trash because it was so hard to figure out what he was trying to say. There is much to admire about Faulkner but his sentence structure is not something to praise unless you admire obscurity.
I try to constantly remember that the fact that I know what it is that I am attempting to convey is no guarantee whatsoever that a reader will know what it is that I am attempting to convey.
There is more wrong with your sentence than numerical inconsistency and that is the last I intend to say on the matter.
I subscribe, I’m no longer sure why, to an e-mail newsletter of a music industry insider, who is what some would call a “graphomaniac”, as on some days he sends out two or three e-mails a day, “analyzing”, if you will, some aspects of some happenings in the music industry. I signed up a couple of years ago after he introduced me to a great undiscovered musical act. I guess, I keep my membership, which is free, by the way, graphomaniacs don’t need to charge, only because every once in a while he composes an e-mail titled “Mailbag” in which he quotes e-mails to himself from various interesting characters in the industry, musicians and managers, writing stories, clarifications, remembrances.
Long story short and my point, the man writes single sentence paragraphs. Declarations, sentences, which all ought to end with exclamation points, no thought ever gets developed, no doubts ever expressed, everything clear, everything stated explicitly, opinion after opinion, judgment after judgment, no ambiguities whatsoever. I’ll take the impenetrable Faulkner over that any day (though frankly, I prefer my T.R. Pearson, and others who write long, long sentences.)
Pikers all! Try Marquez.
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