PARIS — When France started shutting down a few weeks ago as the coronavirus marched relentlessly into the country, Dominique Paul feared disaster. His family’s white-glove catering company, Groupe Butard, halted operations, putting 190 jobs at risk.
Edward Arkwright, the director general of Aéroports de Paris, the Paris airport operator, weighed how to preserve over 140,000 jobs when a freeze on most global airline traffic caused activity to nose-dive 90% in a few head-spinning days.
The future of both businesses, and hundreds of thousands more around France, spiraled into uncertainty. Instead of sinking, though, they are being thrown lifelines as the French government deploys a targeted plan aimed at sheltering companies and keeping every worker possible employed.
“We’re using the government’s whole toolbox to get through this crisis,” said Paul, eyeing the company’s empty Armenonville Pavillon on the edge of Paris, where just weeks ago chefs and waiters served delicacies like scallop carpaccio for glittering events. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
As the coronavirus wallops the world’s economies, France is rapidly emerging as a test case of whether a country can hasten the recovery from a recession by protecting businesses from going under in the first place, and avoiding mass joblessness.
In the United States, the coronavirus has already provoked millions of layoffs. While the $2 trillion rescue package signed by President Donald Trump sends extensive relief to American workers and businesses, France and other European Union countries are deploying a more encompassing state-led approach in the event that the epidemic takes months, rather than weeks, to contain.
“There’s a very different strategy in Europe than in the United States about how to manage this recession,” said Patrick Artus, chief economist of Paris-based Natixis Bank. “The idea is to have no layoffs or company closures, so that when the coronavirus is finally under control the economy can start right back up.”
France is hoping to learn a lesson from the 2008 financial crisis, when it didn’t take aggressive steps to support workers and businesses. Unemployment soon jumped to around 10% and stayed high for half a decade. By contrast, the rise in joblessness in Germany — which kept companies from collapsing by subsidizing furloughs in a system known as “Kurzarbeitergeld,” or short-time work — lasted less than a year before falling steadily.
“France has decided it’s not going to make the same mistake with the coronavirus,” said Simon Tilford, director of the Forum New Economy, a research institution in Berlin. “That approach is going to be much less devastating.”
Austria, Denmark and other northern countries have similar policies, and Britain announced last week that it would do the same. And on Wednesday, the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said governments would join to support short-time work so that “more people will keep their job” during the current crisis.
In France, the government is spending 45 billion euros ($50 billion) to pay businesses not to lay off workers. Deadlines for taxes and loan payments are delayed. Another 300 billion euros in state-guaranteed loans are being extended to any struggling company that needs them.
Over 337,000 businesses have already put 3.6 million employees on paid furlough to be reimbursed by the state, the Labor Ministry said Wednesday. Officials expect the numbers to more than double as it receives “several thousand requests per minute.”
The plan isn’t without risks. European leaders are wary of relaunching the economy before the epidemic is proved to be under control. The tsunami of fiscal support by France and its neighbors — over 2 trillion euros in spending and loan guarantees combined — can only be sustained a few months, economists say.
The risk extends to the businesses as well, which must continue to pay one-fifth of the salaries of employees who aren’t working. If the economy doesn’t rebound by autumn, companies say they may yet be forced to revert to layoffs.
Paul is betting things won’t get that bad, despite fearing the worst when orders were canceled en masse in early March. Events organized by corporate giants like Schneider Electric and the French Federation of Rugby were called off, shrinking his expected monthly revenue of 4 million euros to 500,000 euros and leaving Dominique Julo, the company’s events director, with little to plan for.
Since then, Paul has used all the financial backstops made available by the French government, even delays of payments for electricity bills and rent on Groupe Butard’s offices and its hulking food preparation facilities outside of Paris.
The state will pay him 80% of his employees’ salaries to keep them on payroll. Although Paul is still waiting for the money, because of a backlog in the 10-day reimbursement period promised by the government, the combined financial relief means the company “will be ready to rebound once the crisis is over,” he said.
Use of Germany’s paid furlough program is also soaring. Nearly 500,000 firms filed for support in March, the government said Tuesday, up from fewer than 2,000 in February. Among them are Daimler, Volkswagen, Lufthansa and the company that manages Frankfurt Airport, where air traffic has plunged 90%.
A similar collapse in activity forced Arkwright, the director general of Aéroports de Paris, to put 80% of the 6,000 administrative employees and 135,000 baggage handlers, security agents and other workers on paid furlough after Orly Airport and all but two terminals at Charles de Gaulle Airport, the second-busiest in Europe, closed.
He faced extraordinary circumstances as losses ballooned to an estimated 1.3 billion euros. Adding to the chaos, the chief executive of Aéroports de Paris, Augustin de Romanet, tested positive for the virus, leaving Arkwright to manage on an emergency basis as two-thirds of the airport company’s board also self-quarantined. All the executives emerged in good health.
Aéroports de Paris, which is half owned by the state and is slated for privatization this year, is saving 25 million euros a month from government subsidies for paid furloughs, Arkwright said. The state has asked the company not to pay out an annual dividend.
“The advantage of this approach is that we can start up again literally from one day to the next,” Arkwright said. “I can call you and say, ‘come in tomorrow.’ But if you go into unemployment, it’s not sure you’d be called in for a job. And we would lose people with valuable skills.”
Allowing unemployment to balloon would also cost European governments huge sums, because of the generous benefits offered to fired workers. In Germany, for instance, someone who is let go after 12 months can still receive 60% of their salary for the next nine; in France, unemployment benefits last up to two years.
“Laying people off actually costs more,” said Arkwright.
And people who can keep their jobs “are less unhappy and shocked than people who have been fired,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank in London. “They are less likely to dramatically cut their consumption. That limits the overall economic damage,” he said.
In that sense, Schmieding added, governments paying companies to keep people furloughed “achieve a bigger impact for less money than supporting people who have lost their jobs.” The United States, which will now extend jobless benefits and make one-time cash payments to support workers, is effectively “paying the price for its inadequate welfare net,” he said.
Paul said the French government’s protectionist playbook could sometimes be stifling for business.
But in the coronavirus crisis, safeguarding the economy and helping companies avoid throwing workers into unemployment would leave French society better off than others once the coronavirus epidemic was contained, he said.
“The French system can be cumbersome,” he said. “But it is incredibly effective in times like these.”
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