PARIS: Business is booming for Sylvie Guinard, who runs French machine manufacturer Thimonnier. The problem is, she can’t find the enough staff–even in a country where millions of people are out of work.Guinard, who has a workforce of about 80, struggled for months to find the 10 engineers and technicians she needed to try to keep pace with an order book that rose by a third last year, and she still has two roles unfilled, Reuters reported. Thimonnier and its labor shortages are emblematic of the wider French manufacturing industry and, in turn, other western countries like Germany and the United States where a strong economic rebound is outpacing the capacity of workforces.
The reason for the simultaneous high unemployment and lack of workers is a massive skills mismatch. France simply does not produce enough of the skilled workers it now needs. That means that even as the country is enjoying its strongest growth in six years, the lack of skilled workers is creating production bottlenecks and snarling up supply chains, company executives told Reuters. That in turn is potentially capping how fast the economy can grow. More than a third of French manufacturing companies are operating at full capacity, the highest level since early 1990, while 40% report difficulties recruiting workers, a quarterly survey from the Insee statistics office showed last month. In a sign of surging demand for labor, hiring on permanent contracts rose 6.4% in the fourth quarter to 48%, levels not seen since before the global financial crisis. As elsewhere in the West, wage pressures are building and many employers are resigned to having to raise salaries at some point. There’s a real skills deficit because many young people have turned their back on the industrial sector,” said Guinard. “Bidding competition is going to set in, but it’ll be disastrous for industry because it’s already hard to get by with the hourly rates we have in France. Economist Alexandre Vincent at the COE-Rexecode think-tank points to France’s vast pool of unskilled labor as the main reason France has shortages of workers while the unemployment rate tops 9%.
