Be forewarned: this is a close as a political rant as you'll ever read in these pages. As most of you probably know, our new government in France is keen on breaking the back of what they call our social "archaïsms". In my opinion, some of these probably deserve breaking, others I'm not so sure. But that's not what I want to talk about here, so please bear with me.
The big social topic here (and elsewhere in the Western World, no doubt) is the effect of globalisation on production costs and the migration of French jobs to faraway production facilities in Eastern Europe, North Africa or Asia where labour is cheaper. This trend first affected industry jobs, and indeed there's not much hope of saving these anymore in the long-term (unless you look at a really long term when transportation costs will rise at levels that would offset the labour costs, at least partially.)
Now, however, service jobs are starting to migrate as well, and that's more worrying because the political discourse on globalisation is that specialisation in services is the way to go for the developed world. And that in order to do that, you need better education.
Here in France, unions and left-wing parties are up in arms about the effects of globalisation, they try to block job outsourcings, frequently call for strikes (a national sport over here) etc. Our new government, unsurprisingly, calls this counterproductive and would have us sit down and hope that the announced evolution towards a service oriented economy will miraculously emerge.
But much as I recognise the often archaïc and ideologically tainted beahviour of the unions, I can't help but think (as always) that it takes two to tango. And I see a lot of archaïc behaviour amongst business owners as well. If production costs too much, you either find ways to reduce your costs locally or you outsource. An industrial production has three large categories of costs: labour, equipment and raw materials. The capacity to reduce the latter two is usually limited, and of course production happens in a centralised location. Not much you can do there.
But in the service industry, most of the labour is sitting at desks, and there's nothing that looks so much like a desk than another desk. Now, perhaps you start seeing what I'm getting at. Teleworking. In the service industry, hundreds of thousands of jobs could be switched to teleworking, saving massive amounts of money on office space, transportation and IT resources.
IT resources, you say? A few years back a company that wanted to set up teleworking would have had to equip the worker themselves and ensure maintenance, but today, with the exception of functions like call center operators - who need specific resources - most of the office work can be done using cheap online applications like those provided by Google Desktop. And indeed a number of companies have started looking at models where they finance the worker's equipment but let him set up his own resources at home. All you need then is a secure access solution and a national support contract with a company that can go to your worker's home and fix a bugged computer.
Of course, and this is why I'm mentioning this on fiberevolution, what you also need is a reliable high bandwidth network with universal coverage - or very near so. And in that respect, DSL doesn't quite make it. It's too unstable, and the coverage is far from universal. Plus the speeds you reach with DSL still make the exchanging of large files cumbersome at best. Hence FTTH.
Furthermore, the other identified way of making it against the forces of globalisation is innovation, and innovation requires better education. Doesn't better education require better means of providing that education, however? Don't we think that high bandwidth at the home can open up better ways of teaching, more interaction between teachers and professor, optional self-teaching courses, etc. Of course we do. So far, everyone agrees.
Where the whole machine breaks down is when you have to decide who lays out that network. It doesn't make sense to trust private companies with universal coverage. And it doesn't make sense to trust them with network neutrality. Neither of these objectives are in their commercial interest, and while the latter issue hasn't raised as much rucus here in Europe as it has in the US, it will as soon as fiber represents a significant portion of subscribers. Yet dogmatically, because the incumbent has been (partially) liberalised, the French government is not promoting any form of global view on FTTH deployment. Sure, they publish papers and profess a vision, but where are the incentives, the tax cuts, the global planning that would promote a global approach and ensure the level of coverage and service required to make FTTH the spearhead of our new economy?
Nowhere to be seen, that's where. And why? Partly, I suspect, because French businesses don't ask for it. Talk about teleworking to a French CEO in the service industry, and he'll find dozens of good reasons why it's inapplicable to his business. In most instances, however, the main hurdle is hiw own archaïc view of how a business should be run, his inability to accept that employess can't be visually supervised, his lack of understanding of technology.
I've found figures that state that the proportion of French workers that have done teleworking in 2006 is 6%. And that percentage is defined as people who have worked at least once a week outside their office using IT resources to access the company's network (so it's a broad view that includes commercial people, etc.) In the US in the same period it's 68%. In the UK, 34%. Wow. Talk about archaïc.
I'd love to see this new government tackle these issues in a forward-thinking manner. I think it's crucial that these issues be adresses if we want to succeed in this struggle against the negative effects of globalisation. And when you think about it, it's not that complex:
- Build a framework for universal deployment of an FTTH network (which doesn't mean there can't be commercial deployments as well, the mechanics just need to be identified)
- Use all the available policy tools to ensure this deployment (tax incentives, local government initiatives, etc.)
- Encourage businesses to develop teleworking (again, tax incentives, etc.)
- Kick-start education into integrating the new opportunities provided by high bandwidth t the home.
So what we're talking about here, is dedication, and vision.
And this is looking at a very small portion of the fiber tapestry (pun intended). The above doesn't mention impacts on the environment and decentralisation, it also doesn't look at the specific gains to be had for businesses.
Come on mister Sarkozy! You define yourself as a hands on president, well get going now! This is the single most important mid-term economic issue. Don't let it pass!
