Book review from the Guardian Weekly ========================================= Viviane Forrester can't walk down a Paris street without being stopped. But she is no ordinary celebrity - her latest book is set to be the biggest economics bestseller since Das Kapital, writes Ian Cotton Labour of love Today, for once, Viviane Forrester isn't getting too much hassle. Maybe it's the turbanesque headdress she is wearing. It is an effective disguise for one of Paris's more unlikely celebrities. Forrester is the author of L'horreur Economique, which has sold more than a million copies throughout the world and is shaping up as the biggest economics bestseller since Das Kapital. Typically Forrester's progress down any Parisian boulevard at any time since 1996, when the book was published, has been interrupted by people who recognise her from the jacket photograph or television - and want to tell her how much L'horreur has meant to them. "A quite extraordinary mix, these people who come up and talk," says Forrester, 72, settling herself as unobtrusively as possible at a pavement café on Boulevard St Germain. "Waiters, bankers, housewives, taxi drivers, students, young unemployed . . . stranger still, their opening line is so often the same. 'Subconsciously,' they say, 'I've had exactly the same thoughts you wrote in your book myself, for years. But it wasn't until I read L'horreur that I even realised I'd been thinking them - let alone started taking such ideas seriously'." What is it that resonates so deeply with so many people? It is that Forrester's thesis that employment as we have known it for three centuries throughout the West, has had its day and is becoming less plausible by the year as a way of distributing wealth. However, that is just one strand of her argument; what you might call the futurism. Just as crucial is her attack on what is happening in the present and has been escalating, she thinks, for 30 years: the steepening backlash as Western culture makes ever more desperate attempts to keep the jobs-and-wages system alive. She cites the constant downsizing of ever larger tranches of the working and, now, middle classes; the steady attrition, internationally, of welfare and union rights; the growing destabilisation of those in work, let alone of the unemployed. All this has created an employment and unemployment (and underemployment) culture that is not merely stressful, regrettable and unpleasant but has further, argues Forrester - and it is her tone of outrage which is arguably the book's chief selling point - spawned an economic world that is an obscenity, an affront to human nature; indeed, in the words of the title, a "horror". It is not a thesis likely to appeal to Messrs Clinton and Blair. After all, it doesn't square with the fact that the United States economy is enjoying the longest, strongest economic boom in post-war history. Or that unemployment in Britain is at its lowest for 19 years. Yet there is a curious thing about Forrester's reading of the situation: a vast number of ordinary people believe it, as evidenced by the sales: more than 400,000 in France; 200,000 in Germany; 50,000 in Italy; it is a bestseller in Canada and Japan; it is hugely popular in South America, selling 50,000 in Argentina alone. In France, where unemployment has risen 140-fold since the late 50s and now stands at more than 12%, it is the unemployed young, in particular, who regard Forrester as a heroine. Throughout the country, unemployed people in their 20s have been photocopying pages from L'horreur - notably those decrying the culture of shame attached to unemployment and sticking them up on job centre walls. "It has certainly struck a nerve," says Forrester. "When I was promoting the book in South America I'd go to these town meetings of factory workers, clerks, ordinary people. The cheering would start before I entered the hall." Arguably, the reaction to the book is as significant as its theme. "My book brought me in touch with the powerful as well as the poor, and there is this strong feeling among political elites that you must not tell the people the truth about today's economic realities; that they just can't take it," she says. "In fact, I found the opposite: people aren't, in fact, afraid but they are indignant. They're not stupid, they can see what's going on, and the thing that really angers them is denial. Indeed, it's surprising how many people have told me that reading my book has actually reduced their anxieties. "One long-term unemployed man told me that he started reading my book on the train and he was, as usual, feeling suicidal, and his only reason for not killing himself was to live for his three-year-old son. By the time he got off the train, he said, what he read had turned his mood and he'd decided to live - for himself." It is a story that might sound boastful were it not for the diffident, restrained tones in which Forrester speaks. But then she is as surprised by the reaction to her work as anyone: a chic Parisienne who looks 20 years younger than she is, she used to be better known as a novelist and literary critic. Until L'horreur. Her economics is largely self-taught but she emerges as a fine example of the outsider who sees things insiders cannot. "One day my publisher asked me what I'd like to write about. I replied, a little uncertainly, that I'd like to write about what's happening to work because it seemed to me that this was the subject of today, the one theme at the front of every mind. He said he'd have a contract drawn up in the morning. My publisher has good intuition." But float her thesis, or anything like it, among those of the British middle classes who are still doing well and the reaction, typically, will be: she would say that, wouldn't she, because she's French, and the French have an unemployment rate of 12%, whereas in Britain, thanks to employment flexibility, we have a boom - rising incomes, vibrant growth rates. In short, a parallel economic universe where Forrester's apocalyptic notions simply don't apply. What such roseate views leave out is the quality of jobs. Difficulties are most acute among the much vaunted "new" jobs - new technology, call centres and so on. In the UK, for instance, between the winter of 1992/3 and 1995/6 only 9% of the 750,000 jobs created were permanent and full-time. There is also the UK's remarkably high proportion of households with no working members at all: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's 1998 figures for UK workless households with children were just under 20%, about twice the figure for France. Merseyside had a workless household figure of 28.2%. Not unsurprisingly, there are Britons who can identify with Forrester's attack on neo-liberalism. Rather harder to come by, however, are supporters for Forrester's idea that this is the end of employment as we know it, although this visionary aspect of her theme is gaining ground among the Greens, who can see that fewer jobs equals less pollution. Forrester says with typical self-effacement that if there is any eloquence in her book, it is to be found in the facts. "Look at the rush of people applying for French Contrat Emploi Solidarité jobs which pay half the guaranteed minimum wage, and are part-time at that. What does this tell you about people's desperation?" Nor should one forget those on the workfare in the US (in San Francisco, workfare streetsweepers are paid a third of union rates and have benefits docked for 30 days if they are 10 minutes late for their 6.30am start). Then there are those Britons whose special economic horror is to have achieved invisibility - the "economically inactive" who don't even count as unemployed for statistical purposes. As Forrester puts it: "Neo-liberalism has introduced a new economic paradigm. Increasingly, it offers the most vulnerable in our society a quite new choice - poverty at work or poverty on the dole." The Economic Horror is published by Polity Press, £9.99. The Guardian Weekly 4-11-1999, page 17 ====================================================
