Système D - The power of the people

In which Gerrit the shepherd takes on Pôle Emploi and wins

 Here’s a David and Goliath story to gladden the heart.

France is a land of paradoxes that don’t make sense to outsiders.  It has a rigid, unthinking bureaucracy which snuffs out businesses and blights the lives of its citizens.  On the other hand, millions of ordinary Frenchmen and women outsmart the system every day using guile and imagination.   

Even under socialist president François Hollande, there are no free handouts for a worker who voluntarily quits his job.  However, employees axed by the company receive lavish redundancy compensation.  Social security then provides up to three years generous unemployment pay.

The vital difference between these two extremes is one sheet of paper, the redundancy certificate known as an Avis de Licenciement.

Back in 2010 Gerrit Andriaensen was a shepherd from Dorres, a village in the Pyrenees.  Sheep farming had struggled for years against cheaper lamb imports from far-away New Zealand.  One December day his employer, the local cooperative, had to let him go.

Declaring someone redundant is not for the faint-hearted.  It involves months of statutory notice periods, consultations, recorded-delivery letters and formal meetings.  Gerrit’s employers didn’t do it.  Already three months behind with his salary, they acted too late and no longer had the money to pay him.

They just told him verbally that their flocks would henceforth be one shepherd less.  Gerrit was jobless and minus his salary, redundancy money and the vital Avis de Licenciement.

The trade union, Force Ouvière, helped him to start legal proceedings against the cooperative to obtain the missing paper and the overdue cash. 

All that would take months and he needed to eat in the meantime.  His next stop was Pôle Emploi, the unemployment office in nearby Prades. They refused to register him without the Avis de Licenciement.   That meant no unemployment pay.

People living below the poverty level were entitled to Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA), a welfare payment designed to keep body and soul together.  Naively, Gerrit thought that having no income was the same thing as poverty. 

The government didn’t see it that way.  He couldn’t have RSA either because, well, he should be claiming unemployment pay, shouldn’t he?

Over a year later in February 2012 the legal battle came to a head. A tribunal ordered Gerrit’s former bosses to pay all that was due and issue the Avis de Licenciement.   Insolvent and unable to comply, the cooperative opted for liquidation.  Its managers were replaced by a liquidator.

Now the liquidator refused Gerrit’s request for the precious Avis because he hadn't made Gerrit redundant.  The cooperative’s managers did that before liquidation.  Time for a whole new legal battle. 

In August 2013, almost three years after the nightmare started, Gerrit finally received the backdated Avis de Licenciement.  His joy turned to anger as Pôle Emploi now declared his claim for unemployment pay to be invalid.  The Avis was years late.  It had expired.

The desperate lack of cash and the sense of injustice would not go away – “I’m at a dead end.  I’ve worked 30 years without asking for anything.  I feel hurt that they’ve treated me as less than nothing” said Gerrit. It was time for some people power, known to the French as Système D. 

Let’s roll forward to the present.  Gerrit decides to go to Paris and petition François Hollande, but he has no money for the trip.  Cafés, restaurants and hotels are all but a pipe dream.  

When in real trouble, a Jedi knight calls upon the Force.  Aborginal peoples summon the spirits of their ancestors.  If you're French and in the merde it's time for Système D.

Besides being a shepherd, Gerrit is a volunteer fire-fighter and a champion fell-runner.  He’s aleady won the Gran Volta de Cerdanya, a gruelling 214 km (133 mile) race through the Pyrenees.  Why not run to Paris?  It’s not far, a mere 900 km (560 miles) with around 18 nights sleeping rough in the middle of winter.

The union, Force Ouvrière, launches a publicity campaign and local newspaper, “l’Indépendant”, takes up the baton.  On 21 January Gerrit leaves Dorres and the paper tracks his progress in a regular column, publishing his mobile phone number.

Our Pyrenean shepherd descends to the Mediterranean and follows the coast north-east for a couple of days to Béziers before turning north towards Paris.  People phone to wish him well.  Along the route, journalists call as one local newspaper after another takes up the story.  Then a TV crew arrives and Gerrit appears on the evening news.  In the following days complete strangers seek him out with offers of food.

Six days into the journey things start to go wrong.  Gerrit only has what he can carry in a small backpack.  Under-equipped, he crosses the remote Plateau de Larzac in torrential rain which turns to snow.  His sodden sleeping bag becomes a death trap at night and too heavy to carry during the day.  He abandons it.

This bad news sets off an avalanche of support.  A fire-fighter friend drives a four-hour round trip bringing dry replacements for everything.   As Gerrit resumes the run north, towns and villages offer free meals and then, a bed for the night.  There’s no more sleeping rough.

Sometimes people join him and run alongside for a while.  Further up the bureaucratic food chain from the pen-pushers of Prades, someone notices and starts to wonder where this might lead. There's already too much publicity and the story's taking on a life of its own.

By the time this simple shepherd reaches Paris, his rag-tag bunch of supporters could become a cast of thousands.  François Hollande is already France’s most unpopular president since the Second World War.  The last thing he needs is a folk hero.

Two weeks after leaving Dorres, Gerrit is north of Clermont Ferrand and more than halfway to Paris.  His phone rings.  After months of intransigence, the Pôle Emploi has suddenly reviewed his case.   He can have his unemployment pay after all and they’ll backdate it to when he claimed.  You see, it was all a silly misunderstanding.  

 Oh, and a triumph for citizen power - Système D.

In the Etang de Thau, the World is your oyster

Stretching between Agde and Sète, this 75,000 hectare lagoon provides a unique marine environment

Etang de Thau - not a romantic title, but this 75,000 hectare lagoon on the Languedoc coast hides a watery world of mystery. Forget the surrounding beaches and the yacht races. Here, the steamy action is beneath the surface.

This is shellfish capital of France. Over 800 shellfish farmers take advantage of the étang’s unusual ecology. The water is warm and protected from storms by a long coastal sandbank. Oxygenated fresh water enters from the Canal du Midi and several small rivers. It’s an ideal environment for the phytoplankton which shellfish eat. There’s no better place to be a mollusc.
  
It’s easy to think of oysters and mussels as not particularly bright individuals who just sit around in their shells waiting for something to happen. Then I went to meet Stéphane Saez, a go-ahead oysterman from Marseillan. Well, he shocked me, I can tell you...

Here lies a story of sex, promiscuity, babies, childhood, adolescence and then more sex again. Right under our noses these simple little critters are off down the disco with the ecstasy and...well...you know...doing it. 

Well, OK, I was lying about the sex to get your attention.

Oysters are hermaphrodites, being both male and female but not at the same time. Females secrete eggs and the males sperm into the water where some of them find each other. Only 3 or 4 eggs in 20 million are fertilised and become adults.

Within a day there’s a swimming larva which will grow a small foot and a shell over the next 3 weeks, becoming a miniature adult.

The heavy young oyster falls to the bottom and searches for a solid support, hopefully the oyster bed or better a still, an adult oyster. Junior then glues his foot to the new found support.

After 6 months in this nursery, Stéphane will collect the youngsters and and attache them 10cm apart to ropes so that they have space to grow over the next 18 months. 

Thanks to the étang’s warm water and plentiful nutrients, oysters grow to adulthood in only 2 years, half the time of their relatives on the Atlantic coast. Some babies are brought in from there, though, to genetically refresh the stock.

Ifremer, a government agency samples the water continuously at 10 stations around the lagoon and rigorously controls hygene in production centres like Stéphane's.

Mussels have a similar story but they’re grown in a cunning double tubular netting. Baby mussels are reared in a degradable inner lining. These growing youngsters then punch their way through this netting prison and move into the larger tube which will be their permanent home.

Increasingly, shellfish farmers seek to improve their margins by selling direct to the consumer. Stéphane has his own production facility and now a restaurant, La Grande Bleue.


Stéphane Saez welcomes visitors to his shellfish farm for a guided tour (€7) and restaurant near Marseillan (Telephone 06 60 82 20 60, http://www.conchyliculture.com/visite.htm).