Posted on 06/23/2014 2:31:31 PM PDT by PoloSec
President Obama held up France as the gold standard the U.S. workplace should emulate during an event at the White House Monday.
Extolling the business virtues of helping workers balance family and employment demands, including providing paid time off for the birth of a child, Obama said if France can provide the benefits, so can the United States.
“Other countries know how to do this,” Obama said. “If France can figure this out, we can figure it out.”
France provides some of the most far-reaching worker rights in the developed world, including limiting a standard work week at 35 hours and providing 16 weeks of paid maternity leave.
France also has an unemployment rate that has hovered above 10 percent for more than two years, well above the rate of unemployed in the United Kingdom and the United States, which are both in the 6 percent range.
Obama made the comment at the first White House summit for working families, which sought to amplify issues like paid-maternity leave and the ability to take paid leave to take care of elderly loved ones.
“Many women can't even get a paid day off to give birth,” Obama said. “There is only one developed country in the world that does not offer paid maternity leave, and that is us. And that is not a list you want to be on, by your lonesome.”
The White House hosted the summit jointly with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and it served in part as a campaign pep rally focused on turning women voters out in November.
The president's filled his remarks with appeals to working moms, talking at length about his role in caring for daughters Malia and Sasha when they were infants and both he and First Lady Michelle Obama worked full-time.
When dads rearrange their schedules to leave early to go to a parent-teacher conference, “everybody in the office says, 'Oh, isn't that nice?'” he said. “And then when women do it, everybody is all 'Like, y'know, is she really committed to the job?'”
The White House attempt to elevate the issue of workplace flexibility isn't corresponding with any new legislative proposals.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest blamed Republicans for the lack of progress on work-place benefits.
“There are a lot of good ideas being blocked in Congress right now,” he said, referring to the House GOP's opposition to an increase in the minimum wage.
Sure, its the gold standard. If you don’t mind 10 - 15% unemployment, unsustainable structural deficits and riots any time the government tries to introduce workplace flexibility measures.
Get ready for French taxes and unemployment.
Figures he would cite a EU Third World country for his Progressive Utopia.
another sign of delusional opinions about the world. Ask anyone in the real world of business if they think France is the gold standard for the operation of an economy and they will look around nervously for the men in white coats with nets.
I worked in an American division of Schlumberger. Dealing with the French headquarters was almost impossible. Not only did they have a ridiculous number of holidays, between those and extensive vacations it was hard to talk to anybody. Then, on top of that they had sick time. My boss said some employees only worked around 800-1000 hours a year, half what we worked.
What they did do was of extremely poor quality. Also, they regularly lied and committed fraud. They’d ship military equipment that would not turn on right out of the box. In a case effecting me I took the paperwork and reviewed the data to see if there was a clue. Since they were all gone for a month of vacation we broke the seals and opened the box. It was missing a power supply. That means the data was entirely fraudulent. They’d lied to book in the shipment and get us to pay them so they could finish it before their holiday. Here that would be a go-to-jail fraud. There it was, “eh, who cares?”
I think hussein is much more advanced than France since he has turned most USA jobs into 29 hours per week.
If there are business virtues for doing it, then business can choose to do it without government intervention. The very fact that Obama desires to do it through his command and control economic model means that it almost certainly doesn't have a business virtue.
I suppose he also likes the French method of having government inspectors track whether employees are spending too much time at work.
..our 3rd World pResidnet!!
He claims to be working toward French level benefits but his real goal is more like Somalia.
Obama is such a fool
didn’t the President of France campaign on a 75% tax rate?
What would Barry know about work?
People who worked at Volvo have always complained that the Swedes worshiped American labor laws while lauding the Swedish ones. One Swedish executive even said that it was against American law to give a worker more than 2 weeks vacation.
He apparently didn’t even know he was delivering a punchline.
ba-da-bing
I think Obama has Carson’s ex attorney as an advisor.
Bombastic Bushkin! (no relation to Bush)
The know nothings leading the know nothings...
He is the punch-line for just about every joke these days.
So true
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