Salaries in France

          Salaries in France by Nihar Purkait   11/02/13

Economic recession in Europe is having profound impact on people’s lives. In order to find how the recession has changed lives and income, we conducted a small survey of working people in and around Paris. We interviewed a number of persons to know among other things how their income level has changed in last one year. We found that computer programmers have an hourly wage (for ex: 23 euros per hour) that has not changed in the past one year. Outside sales employees are not the only people who do not to have a minimum salary; professionals (like teachers, lawyers, doctors) also do not have a minimum salary.
Of course some people we interviewed were not very keen on sharing that information and just made fun of it by saying: “A billion euro”. Some of them were just rude and shooed us away.

But luckily, some of them were nice and answered our questions. The first person we interviewed was our local butcher Pierre Montier. We asked him how much he earned in a month, He said that it kept changing depending on how many people wanted to buy meat from him and not from some supermarket. On an average he earned 1,800 euros, but he said he was still grateful since last year his monthly wage was only 1,700 euros. Then we moved on and went to interview a garbage collector, Sebastian Perrilot. He was very polite and greeted us with a delightful “Bonjour” (I don’t think he knew how to speak English). We asked him how much he earned per month and he answered in French “une mille euros” which means a 1,000 euros. We also asked him about how much he earned last year and he answered "c'était la meme" which means that it was the same. Next we went to a surgeon, Louis Baptiste. Luckily, he knew how to speak English! We asked him how much he earned monthly and he answered it was around ”8,500 euros”. He said he was satisfied with his wage and didn’t want it to change.

As we kept going up from lower to higher classes, we saw that the salaries varied a lot. For example, the garbage collector, Sebastian Perrilot only got about 1,000 euros monthly;  our local butcher Pierre Montier  was earning around 1,800 euros a month, which kept changing depending on how many people bought his product, while some people like Alex Garment (a lawyer whom we interviewed the last) said that he got 10,500 euros monthly. But unfortunately, this difference of wages between people is a normal day to day life thing that we are used too, since the world functions like that. Some people are living a good, comfortable life with more money than they can spend in two lives, and some people did not even a penny to spare.