Like most countries open to world trade, French business operates within the emerging framework of international competition. Between the strong pressure of market and consumers, which scope is increasingly global, on the one hand, and demands of government and unions, remained mostly national, on the other hand, there is a growing difficulty for companies to be profitable and tackle most serious challenges. Few countries offer an environment so deeply contradictory and therefore such an inconclusive economic situation. Change management is the hidden meaning of restructuring. While nothing, fortunately, can seriously prevent companies from restructuring, everything is however put in place to make change management more difficult in France . .
The first consequence is a temptation now rooted in France to create a double labour market, one living at the rhythm and with most characteristics of free market, the other confined in the nest of national public rules. With an employment rate among the lowest in the OECD, at 63 % against 65 % in Germany , 74 % in the US or 69 % in Japan , France is lagging behind in terms of job-sharing, while having difficulties to keep its social security system and the innovation pace. Though relying on a high productivity growth in the last decades, this policy is now incapable to meet the broad restructuring wave which is overthrowing Europe at the moment.
Hence the bad performance of the country on purchasing power figures in the 90s, and the particularly ridiculous employment rate of senior (less than 34 %, against more than 38 % in Germany , less than 58 % in the US or less than 63 % in Japan ). On the other side of the spectrum, a lot of particular contracts have been established since the 70ies to artificially incorporate young workers at a lower cost, both in the private
sector and in the public administration or the local communities. This has led to an important overall increase of collective costs and has put aside many incentives normally coming out of competition. With the 35 hours law, this landscape of deterrence against the value of work is completed and postpones the entrance of France in the modern paradigm of capacities and competitiveness.
But those constraints don't apply solely to specific workers, they also imply methods requirements. What is specific to my country is this very thick legal set of rules which conveys and organise the expectations and roles of different stakeholders, such as unions, media, local communities, etc. Among the most challenging methods is, more than its costs, the potential length of a restructuring process, with interventions of labour inspectorate, workers representatives, and often the government and the judges.
This being said, the drivers of change are quite comparable to those of any other developed economy and encompass many trends which impact skills and employment.
     •  size and degree of openness of the market, and its capacity to implement coherent policies or investment decisions ;
     •  innovation and technology, which in France is more and more imported via intellectual property ;
     •  outsourcing, which entails both more services in industry and the relative growth of SME's in the economy ;
     •  foreign development, because companies now try to narrow the production from fast-growing markets (products or countries).
When trying to answer to above mentioned evolutions, companies are fighting for their freedom of manoeuvre with regard to legislations often ill-conceived to allow business to act quickly on international markets. The starting point in France is age-management : how to recruit more skilled young people and to shift senior population which is supposed to be less productive and dragging feet on change ?
Restructuring is now at the centre of crossed reflections on R&D and technology, social security modernisation, comparative advantages, governance, labour contracts, and business culture. The European Commission issued a communication in December 2002 on industrial policy, to try and evaluate the means to strengthen European companies. Meanwhile, a social dialogue process developed in 2002 and 2003, based on practical cases, on how to manage industrial change and its consequences. This process ended mid-2003 with the adoption of European “orientations of reference on change”. A comparable attempt is taking place in France in the first half of 2004 on the protection and the development of employment.