Corporations (2/3)

Here is the business plan:
- Open for business 24/7. Personnel: rotations of couples.
- Commercial services: grocer’s, baker’s, 1 petrol station (petrol, fuel, diesel), cybercafé (Internet, e-mail, Word, Excel) with Ordissimo laptops (easy to use), etc.
- Administrative services: mail (parcels, letters, registered items, stamps), a few emergency and proximity municipal services, a few administrative services (form-filling), etc.
- High prices because of the quality of the services and the need for a local set-up.
- Cash adjustment from the administrations offering a few basic services.
It is crucial to find a commercial, capitalistic solution to supplement the State’s efforts to prevent rural depopulation (setting up medical centers, administrative centers, etc.)

WATER: A PRIVATE OPERATION CONTROLLED BY A PUBLIC LOCAL AUTHORITY
Clearly, operating a collective drinking and waste water treatment service requires infrastructure investments and technical capacity for monitoring and maintenance. Today, the large private sector water companies are the ones most technically able to design, build, manage, and maintain that infrastructure because they pool their research and development efforts among numerous cities as well as their accumulated expertise levels – their workers’, technicians’, and engineers’.
Having said this, let us not forget that private sector means profits and, often, abuse. Hence, it is necessary to keep within municipal control a few engineers or technicians who can check the infrastructure proposals and the quality of the services rendered. Similarly, one needs to keep a few accountants who work for the municipality so they can check that the initial contracts are all above board and that there’s no shift over time.
Profits should not be forgotten either. One could, for instance, establish a contract baseline at the average cubic meter cost over the last 10 years, and share the operating savings linked to privatization on a 50/50 basis between the private operator and the municipality. The infrastructure would initially be financed by the private operator and repaid through the cost of water by the private consumers, with non-usurious market-based interest rates.
Here is the deal: municipalities are freed from the worry of the day-to-day water management, and they do not need to develop heavy technical skills; the large private companies bring their expertise and are paid for it while accepting a certain financial and technical control from the municipalities to avoid abuses.

ORGANIZING WORKING SCHEDULES
To motivate employees, it is best to offer double pay for working on Sundays and triple pay for working on those public holidays permitted in the Labor law.
A more radical alternative, which I have been advocating for a long time, is to organize the work week into two teams: the one would be Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday (Mo-Th), and the other Friday-Saturday-Sunday (FSS). Contract-based working hours and schedules and salaries would be negotiated with the two teams. For instance, if the FSS team is financially worthwhile, it will attract young people who do not have to face the issue of child care over the weekends, students who have to attend classes over Mo-Th, or elderly people who ignore religious rituals (we live in a secular State). This reorganization of the economy would bring greater regularity; the FSS workers would attend to the needs of the Mo-Th, and vice versa. And all of this would greatly benefit the GDP, company profits, taxes, and help reduce unemployment!

KEY WORDS FOR A FLOURISHING EUROPEAN INDUSTY
- Innovation (to go a step further than the competition)
- Design (the fashion world, architecture, arts & crafts, coupled with industrial objects: aesthetic qualities provide added value which sets one apart from one’s competitors)
- Simplicity (to operate, repair, and maintain, to use on a day-to-day basis, to be compatible with other electronic devices, to change to another product further down the line, to recycle and control pollution)
- Ecology (energy saving, recycling, preserving non-renewable resources, not polluting)
- Robustness, rusticity (There are far too many products on the market that do not function properly under normal conditions of use or worsened conditions such as climatic stress)
- Top-of-the-range (we’ve already lost the production costs war against the emerging countries; what’s needed is to focus on products one generation ahead, the way good chess players plan their moves in advance, anticipating better than their adversaries)
- Training the labor force (both initial and in-service training constitute a good investment that motivates employees, empowers them, expands their area of expertise, and broadens their minds, which will then facilitate taking initiatives and identifying business opportunities)
- Dual remuneration system with a fixed part enabling a comfortable lifestyle in the host country and a variable part that is based on the benefits accrued and proportional to the number of employees (of the entity or the global company) rather than the basic salary. This means employees are more involved in their job, and the company can absorb the bottom-of-the-cycle shocks by limiting the fixed salary expenses at that time.

LAKSHMI MITTAL
This steel industry leader’s blackmail is based on the threat that if the Florange blast furnaces are nationalized, he will abandon all operations in Dunkerque and Fos-sur-Mer … In other words, the fallacy is that no other investor would be prepared to buy those plants (20,000 jobs) if Lakshmi Mittal sells them for a song – what a joke! In a capitalist society, nothing is rejected forever and low-cost sales will necessarily attract someone else …
What I think should be done is to brand this unworthy leader by using the tool of nationalization as a sanction in Florange, as was done after WWII, to punish the non-respect of commitments made to the French government. Doubtless, this sanction will give wings to the governments of those other countries where Mr Mittal is also holding employees hostage and, in the end, his murky business will turn bankrupt.