Rick's b.log - 2023/11/18
You are 18.119.167.189, pleased to meet you!
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Rick's b.log - 2023/11/18 |
| It is the 24th of November 2024 You are 18.119.167.189, pleased to meet you! |
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mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu
My boss asked me if I wanted to do it, and knowing that would mean a 5am start, I declined. Though, yesterday, I left a note with her with my phone number to say that if somebody was ill or whatever, call me at 7am (when I get up) and I can be there for 8am.
The phone never bleeped. Well, I offered, wasn't needed.
One of the things that stuck was a pay rise for us. I'm now being paid €11,7423 per hour (note, that's brut). Which means I now make €33.72 extra at the end of the month. It's not particularly impressive, but it's something. And as I said in the past, probably more than once, it's not about the money, it's about the principle. By giving us what amounts to minimum wage when we're OE3 rather than OE1, the company is expecting this extra stuff essentially for free.
Oh, and I've checked some job listings elsewhere. As far as I can determine, France has four kinds of employee.
At the top, the "upper management" track. These people make a good amount of money, as upper management types do. This also counts for stuff like lawyers, company owners, and so on. These are the sort that get the bonuses and perks. Especially if they do stuff like bringing costs down (even if the way of doing that is paying the employees less and cutting back on various types of necessary expenditure). People who get here are either extremely talented, extremely lucky, or have family connections pulling strings. It's often the latter.
The "encadrement" track. This is lower management. Like at the place I work, the ones who sit in the front office staring at computer screens all day. These are the ones that went to uni and/or college, probably have bits of paper attesting that they have all these skills in theory (if not always in reality) and it's often quite stressful as unless they are great at blame deflection, it's their heads that will roll if they fail to meet the (sometimes unreasonable) expectations of the higher management; unless they work in public service in which case there are tens of thousands of faceless beaurocrats (this is France, if it's not in triplicate it might as well not exist). I think this group is paid about three times what we make (but, again, it depends upon category which depends upon job specifics, experience, and so on). Most of the younger people I have spoken to want a job at this sort of level because they don't want to be "a worker" and they're not delusional enough to think they can make it to the top.
And, at the bottom, are the majority. The workers. Ranging from OE1 (expected to be clueless) to something like OE5 (I think the girls that operate the dosing machines are this), it's basically minimum wage plus a few crumbs on top. This category greatly outnumbers the rest.
The fourth category are those who don't easily fit into any of these groupings. From bin men to bookshop owners...
It's no wonder that, following Covid when we had a bunch of temp workers that were student types, they all wanted to do things like "be a masseuse", "be a person helping to educate special needs kids", "be a speech therapist". I think the perception is that these are jobs that are not that difficult that pay well (which is, I presume, why nobody wanted to be a teacher). Certainly nobody said "I want to start at 5am for seven hours of standing there putting the proverbial cherries on top of the proverbial cake".
All of which leads to job adverts like "lab assistant wanted - must have this sort of higher education - experience not necessary, you'll get training - starting salary is €1747,20/month brut. That's minimum wage.
Anyway, I now make "about a euro and a half a day" extra. Not a lot, but since it's the principle, me bastaría.
French savings accounts typically offer deplorable rates of interest. I knew about the LEP but wasn't interested before as in 2020-2021 the rate was 1%. It's only recently with the skyrocketing inflation that the government has taken the initiative to bump up the interest rate on this account.
My other savings account, the Livret A. This is another tax free account, this time limited to €22,950. It currently offers 3% interest. At the beginning of each month, just prior to pay day, I transfer any leftover money in my regular account (which does not gain interest) to the savings.
Another savings option with a useful level of interest is the LDDS which pays 3%, but you have to pay an amount of the interest (25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of your choice) to an association such as the Red Cross, Catholic Assistance, Doctors without borders, food banks, the lifeboats, etc etc.
It's quite appalling, and entirely expected, that the available interest rates bear no relationship to the rates set by the ECB, which would be applied to loans and mortgages quickly enough...
Unfortunately... she's not real, as the caption at the bottom ought to indicate.
Let's try her with a different skirt and just a touch older. That was supposed to be a teenager (but didn't look like it), so let's skip over young adult and try adult.
The face kind of looks the same to me...
An "AI Human Generator" has blended together parts of loads of pictures of people to create an imaginary person, to which you can tweak various parameters such as pose, clothing, and so on.
So, let's give Lucie a dress and make her middle aged <cough>like me</cough>.
Okay, her face is looking a little older now but I don't think "middle aged" (I just tried three online age detection systems and one said 27 and another said 31, and plugger.ai said between 32 and 40).
Photos by generated.photos.
The Human Generator is an interesting thing to play with. However, I'll give you a couple of notes:
Case in point, I just gave Dall-E2 the following description: A photo of a thirty year old woman standing in an autumn forest. She has chest length black hair and glasses, and is wearing a black maxi dress, tights, and black shoes. She looks happy.
Ummm...
That's not to say that you can't get some nightmare fuel from the Human Generator. I changed the "middle aged" Lucie to the legs-spread porn pose and the result was... way too much like Sarah Palin for my liking.
To fix the Palin nightmare fuel, a photo of when she was little, learning her love of books. And if you're wondering about her odd expression, it's because she knows she's going to wet the bed tonight, if she actually manages to get to sleep at all. Because she's just finished Watership Down, a book about bunnies. Bunnies! What could possibly go wrong with a book where the protagonists are bunnies? Well, a childhood dose of post traumatic stress disorder for one...
Work offer
The girls are working as I started to write this. There are a lot of orders (which is a good thing, of course!) so there's an exceptional Saturday being worked. Earlier in the year we did eight hour days to minimise the number of Saturdays worked. They were aiming for none, but the thing about plans is that reality often interrupts them.
Pay rise!
As you know, I was being paid €11,53-something. Like petrol prices, there was a lot of digits after the decimal point. To put this into context, €11,52 is minimum wage. Which means that us washer-upper people, being categorised as "OE3" (which means we look after ourselves and don't need to have a line manager telling us what to do) would be making €2,12 a month more than the production line girls, who do have line managers, we do have other people to tell them what to do and when to do it, and who don't work with chemical products, don't need to know how to use the machinery or the various settings/programmes, don't work in a humid (and rather noisy) environment, with much less manual effort required.
Four of us wrote a letter to HR asking why, if we had all these extra competences, we were basically being paid the same as them.
Sadly, since then two of the people have left (one directly citing the lousy pay as a factor), while the third (who was an agency worker) accepted a full time contract after realising that unimpressive pay was better than no pay if the agency couldn't find her a placement elsewhere.
Well, we recently had something called the NAO - the obligatory annual negotiation with the union rep, where she makes a list of demands and the company agrees to a few of them. The demands range from the entirely reasonable to the laughably ludicrous, but given it only happens once a year I guess it makes sense to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Sure, if you have the paperwork and experience and abilities, you might get offered a better wage. But, then again, you might not. It seems to me that wages in France aren't particularly impressive until you're like halfway up the ladder. And the majority only get to sit on the ground beside the ladder...
Free money!
As my wage is not impressive, there are certain things that I have access to. One of these things is called the LEP - Livret d'Épargne Populaire. This is a special sort of savings account where the interests are tax free. It has the limitation that the maximum you can put into it is €10,000, but on the other hand it is pretty much the only account with a decent level of interest right now. It is currently at 6%.
So I opened that, and transferred the money from my savings account to fill it. If the interest rate remains at 6%, that'll be €600/year for essentially doing nothing. Well, it'll pay the electricity...
Otherwise you're looking at "Le Grand Livret" (unregulated, no risk, taxable, limited to €1.5M) which offers a miserable 0.50% interest. The "Livret Librissime" (unregulated, no risk, taxable, no limit) offers 1%.
...but, as with pay, the little guys get screwed. If I put twenty five thousand into the Grant Livret, over the course of a year that would make me a miserly €125. Ask yourself how much it would make the bank.
Say hello to Lucie
So, I met this lovely girl at work. She speaks quirky English and understands my awful
Franglais. She's delightfully snarky, and appreciates somebody (me) that gets the offbeat humour. We went for a walk in the woods after work yesterday, given that it was one of the few days it wasn't lousy weather (we've had four storms blow through in two and a half weeks) and it was really quite pleasant.
She allowed me to take a photo.
A walk in the forest.
A walk in the forest, adult.
A walk in the forest, middle aged.
I've given her a dress as older people don't tend to dress quite like teenagers. She's still quite cute, though, don't you think?
Here's a link to the first picture, the second picture, and the third picture
So always explicitly select what clothing you require.
Just be glad these monstrosities are scaled down.
jgh, 18th November 2023, 20:38
But the last one - yikes! My first thought was: Call Child Services!jgh, 18th November 2023, 20:45
Software Engineer
Requirements:
MSc/PhD/Doctorate in Computer Science or a related field from a Russell Group University
Strong academic background with a minimum of First-class, Distinction, or Distinction*
....
Salary: GBP 25,000
UK minimum wage is just under £21,000.Rick, 18th November 2023, 20:46 David Pilling, 18th November 2023, 23:13
Interest rates - probly not that different to the UK - they are about 5% for unlimited amount accounts that tie your money up for a year. 8% for one that is very restricted in how much you can put in. You would have to consider how much inflation is - more in the UK than in the Euro zone. It's about how much you're losing a year - inflation has been way above interest rates.
Central banks in the USA, UK and EU have all been playing the same game for many years - low interest rates, quantitative easing. And the resulting high inflation. Holding cash has been a mugs game for a very long time - and the smart guys running the banks didn't mention that.jgh, 18th November 2023, 23:53
Saying your job pays £26,000pa sounds fairly ok until it's pointed out they only pay you for the six months they want to employ you. :(Anon, 21st November 2023, 20:27
Meanwhile, you really need to find yourself a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in .jpg :)jgh, 26th November 2023, 08:09
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