Slackers of the world, unite!

Are Europeans of less economic value than monkeys?

This week, drunk on a cocktail of Olympic spirit, though incurably reluctant to inflict any lasting damage on my prize-winning muscles, I’ve been wrestling Greco-Roman style with one of life’s more humungous questions.

It all began on a seemingly average Thursday morning. I was innocently chomping on my breakfast banana when my bleary eyes chanced upon an article in the International Herald Tribune entitled “Monkeys become workaholics when scientists block a gene”.

A tsunami of self-consciousness crashed upon the nudist beach that passes for my brain. Suddenly, my pupils were friskier than Errol Flynn after three martinis. It took a superheroic spoonful of daring to read on, but somehow I managed it.

According to boffins at the National Institute of Mental Health (which happens to be my favourite weekend getaway), “monkeys are like other primates – in no hurry to do work any sooner than it needs to be done.”

This may sound innocent enough to European ears, but in the land of Gordon Gekko, where “money never sleeps, pal”, geneticists have worked tirelessly to turn your average indolent chimp into a “non-stop worker” (thereby saving a fortune in potential social security handouts).

I flung my banana skin in the general direction of the bin and speed-dialled my boss.

“It’s me. I hope you’re not thinking of replacing me with an ape. It’ll never work. Who’d pick up your laundry? Expect to hear from my union as soon as I get round to forming one.”

It’s no secret that Americans live to work and Europeans occasionally work to holiday. According to one recent survey, most American fathers put in so many hours at the office they haven’t seen their families since the spring of 1986. American mothers are said to hold an average of 4.8 jobs, none of which come with medical.

Things are a tad different across the pond. You’re more likely to be granted communion by the Pope than find a Frenchman who works in August.

The International Monetary Fund is said to be “urging Europeans to work longer and harder to stiffen up their soft economies.” (A large shipment of viagra would save a lot of time and energy. )

OK, so I’m not the first to say Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But I am the first to steal the idea.

It was Robert Kagan, the big daddy of neo-connery, who first identified this planetary disconnect. You’ll never find Evian water on Mars, he said. And Venus is an armless tease who’ll never be seduced by the bulging biceps of the God of War. (Don’t laugh, I’ve given papers on this.)

But in his splendid new book, Free World: why a crisis of the west reveals the opportunity of our time, Timothy Garton Ash argues that Kagan’s neat and petite thesis is in reality sheer baloney. No way are Europe and America chalk and cheese, Garton Ash says. Europe is a cheese and America is cheesier. Europeans might be a little on the mouldy side, like Roquefort, and Americans a little more plastic, like the processed crap you find in Big Macs, but when push comes to shove (and it always does), both come from cows. (I paraphrase here.)

This is a supremely attractive argument and as you read it you find yourself nodding and letting out little grunts of agreement that cause the guy sitting next to you on the train to give up his seat. Unfortunately, like all attractive arguments, it’s not true.

Here’s why: As America busies itself trying to get longer working hours out of orang-utans, the new publishing sensation sweeping France is a book by Corinne Maier called Bonjour Paresse (translation: Hello Laziness: the art and the importance of doing the least possible in the workplace).

The New York Times dubs the work “a sort of slacker manifesto”. The Financial Times heralds “The slacker’s new bible”. Europe, it seems, has finally come out of the closet after a fifty-year cigarette break.

Good for Europe. Let’s face it: a continent of incompetent layabouts married to pointless public sector jobs in sclerotic bureaucracies was never going to compete with the dynamism of Team USA. Donald Rumsfeld is right – Europe is old and fannies around the house all day in its slippers. Uncle Sam, in contrast, is a spring chicken (or at the very least a wiry geriatric who glugs a ton of cod liver oil).

In a typical display of sophisticated diplomatic charm, Jack Kennedy once described how “the distinguishing mark of the Frenchman, is his cabbage breath and the fact that there are no bathtubs.” After extensive travels around the home of haute cuisine, haute couture, et haughty Parisian femmes, JFK concluded, “France is quite a primitive nation.” The French responded by naming a Parisian boulevard after him.

I mention this delicious slice of history not only for the cheap laughs, but because it evokes a serious point which I’ve now forgotten.

The New York Times, often accused of conducting an unhealthy love-affair with the land of l’escargot, breathed a giant sigh of relief in its review of Corinne Maier’s bestseller: “Finally, instead of dissembling behind ambiguous notions of Gallic joie de vivre, someone in this leisurely land has declared outright that the French should eschew the Anglo-Saxon work ethic and openly embrace sloth.”

Check out these excerpts:

• “What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you’re untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.”
• “You’re not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside track.”
• “Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your ‘contribution to the wealth of the firm’. Avoid ‘on the ground’ operational roles like the plague.”
• “Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system.”

Ms Maier has “worked” for years at the state-owned Electricité de France. The company is now taking legal action against her for “repeatedly failing to respect her obligations of loyalty towards the company” and running a “personal campaign … to spread gangrene through the system from within.”

My memory may well be fried on Ricard, but I swear the White House once made the same case against Jacques Chirac.