SPECIAL REPORT

Posted Sunday, September 25, 2005; 14.16BST
But take a closer look, and even in Heidelberg, work isn't what it used to be. Unemployment in the city is close to 9%. At a bar that calls itself the Hard Rock Café in a cobblestoned street in the downtown area, "happy hour" has been renamed "Hartz IV hour" — after Germany's new labor legislation that cuts the amount of unemployment benefit and puts a strict time limit on it. Employees at one of the town's biggest firms, the printing machinery company Heidelberg Druckmaschinen, have been working far more hours than usual over the past year, the price of a deal with management that enabled them to keep their jobs at all. When the firm hit a troubled spell in 2002-03, they reduced their hours to avoid layoffs. Now that orders have picked up again, they are working extra time without extra pay. "Everyone's frightened. People prefer to work longer hours than lose their jobs," says Manfred Hoppe, a local official for IG Metall.

It's the memory of good times past that hurts. Sitting in his sun-drenched office near Heidelberg's university library, sociology professor Wolfgang Schluchter — one of Max Weber's successors — recalls how he grew up at a time when economic growth was automatic and people had jobs for life. "The postwar era was a short and exceptional period and it won't come back, but many institutions were built on this basis of continuous growth," says Schluchter, 67. "Today life is far more complicated. If you have a job, you can't be sure you'll still have it in three years." His own son, a biologist, was out of work for a few months recently. "It's very hard to formulate a work ethic for today," Schluchter says. "It's very hard to communicate to the majority of the population that more work means less unemployment."

MISSPENT MONEY, MISMATCHED SKILLS
Older workers in particular find themselves being pulled this way and that. As a computer specialist, Patrick Mayo has the sort of skills you might expect to be in demand. But there's a problem: he's 50, and in France today that makes him virtually unemployable. French firms have every incentive not to hire older workers, the lingering legacy of a policy popular in the 1980s to get the over-50s out of the work force by subsidizing their early retirement. Belgium, Germany and some other countries also introduced active early-retirement policies. They didn't work. Firms took the subsidies, slashing the number of older workers on their payrolls — but didn't hire anybody to replace them. Partly as a result, only 37% of people between the ages of 55 and 64 remain in the work force in France, compared with around 60% in the U.S., Denmark or Japan. At the same time, as of July 2005 France's youth unemployment is over 22%, one of the highest in the developed world. Mayo, for one, is so angry that earlier this year he went on a five-week protest hike through France. "At 50 you're still active, full of initiative, capable of doing something," he says. "At the beginning it was personal. I became a messenger because of all the people I met. This is a national catastrophe."

Yet for every 50-year-old Frenchman who wants to work but can't, there's an 18-year-old who could but won't. A study by France's Unedic unemployment insurance agency earlier this year found that 45% of businesses surveyed were looking to fill vacancies — but complained about difficulties in finding enough or suitable candidates. One in five small and medium-sized companies and one in three large firms affiliated with the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry report that they are unable to fill available posts. "The biggest problem isn't that the French are lazy, it's that they're rational," says Jean-Luc Biacabe, an economist at the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "Many unemployed people are good at figuring out when swapping public assistance to work low-paying jobs isn't in their interest. This option of being able to refuse work must change."

At least one German entrepreneur has come up with a solution to the problem: last October, Fabian Löw, a student from Münster, set up a website called www.job dumping.de that allows job seekers to post their skills — ranging from pet grooming to accounting — and the minimum amount they will work for. (There's no statutory minimum wage in Germany.) Would-be employers then place their bids. Alternatively, employers can also post jobs that need doing, along with how much they are prepared to pay — and candidates compete for work. Since going live, the site has brokered some 1,800 deals and has more than 10,000 registered users. But it's also sparked a storm, with politicians and trade unionists denouncing the idea. Dirk Niebel, general secretary of the supposedly free-market Free Democrats, slammed the website as a "slave market."

Löw, 32, believes he is doing nothing more than applying a healthy dose of realism to Europe's sclerotic labor market. "We start where the politicians stop telling people the truth," he says. And for Europeans, the awkward truth is this: the labor-market policies and ideas about work that grew up after World War II no longer cut it. A sort of eBay for jobs may not put Europe back to work, but ideas like this are surely preferable to — literally — doing nothing.

With reporting by Maryann Bird and Jeneé Darden/London, Bruce Crumley and Mikael G. Holter/Paris, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen, Francis X. Rocca/Rome, Ursula Sautter/Bonn, Jane Walker/Madrid and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin

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