Reading Bernard Friot
Bernard Friot writes fundamental books, which deserve to be read more widely. In French bookstores, it is his homonym author of children’s books that is easier to find. Why this situation?
Friot, why is he important?
Without being specialists in economics or management, all political discussions lead us to address the issue of unemployment and its compensation, purchasing power, but also the age of retirement and level of pensions, or even the future of hospitals and schools.
From my experience, conversations are of the type:
- pensions, public services… are decreasing in amount and quality, government after government, reform after reform. We must increase them!
- yes, but it’s expensive. To fund them we should increase taxes, or increase corporate taxation, or else we leave public debt for our children to repay
- so asking for better services is either utopian or irresponsible
The conversation deserves not to stop there. How are these public services actually financed? If we understand it better, we can then be more precise about the findings (do we lack the money to fund them?) and about the solutions (what is fair and effective funding?).
Bernard Friot, and this is his importance, studied these subjects (with others of course) and wrote many books to present his research.
He does a meticulous job, starting with that of defining a precise vocabulary. For example, he speaks of “direct salary” rather than “net salary”, to emphasize that there is also an indirect salary, which is that of the benefits we receive (family allowances, pensions, healthcare reimbursements, etc.) financed through social security contributions.
The second contribution of his work is the historical perspective. We have memories (from our schoolbooks, from our parents or otherwise) that the history of public services is intimately linked to social and political history. For example, social security was instituted in 1945 by the government of General de Gaulle in the direct line of the work of the National Council of the Resistance. But why ? It’s still intriguing to think that in a country devastated at the end of the war (with ration tickets etc!), we decided to set up new services for the entire population! Why so, but also: how did they do it?
And finally (for this blog post at least…), Friot’s work is international in scope. I had learned the difference between the English “Beveridgian” social security system and the French system resulting from the “Bismarckian” logic. One financed by taxes, the other based on labor income. Ok, but what does it change? There are questions of base and other effects, of course, but what is the fundamental difference that justifies taking the trouble to distinguish between two systems? There, I simply did not know… Friot details the implications very well - I’m not spoiling, I’ll write a post on it.
But Friot is hard to read…
Friot’s research is academic, and has spanned decades. The subject (social security in all its states) is very dense with many acronyms, concepts, legislations, organizations and milestones to remember, plus all the references in political philosophy. So you can get lost.
Solutions to read Friot
Aware of this concern, Friot has published transcripts of lengthy interviews which are more illuminating [in French]. There is :
In English, there is this academic collective volume on employment policies in Europe
And this “gesticulated” lecture, also in French:
My own attempt
To understand, question and use what I learn from reading Friot, I will need to take notes. My intention is to use this blog to inspire me to clean up these notes. Hoping that this will make his work more accessible to everyone.
The book I am going to read is “Puissances du salariat”, which is an adapted and augmented version published on 2012 of Friot’s thesis, published originally in 1998 :
