Quoting the Times:
"Imitate me, midlevel executives, white-collar workers, neo-slaves, the damned of the tertiary sector," Ms. Maier calls in her slim volume, which is quickly becoming a national best seller. She argues that France's ossified corporate culture no longer offers rank-and-file employees the prospect of success, so, "Why not spread gangrene through the system from inside?"[...]
Her solution? Rather than keep up what she sees as an exhausting charade, people who dislike what they do should, as she puts it, discreetly disengage. If done correctly - and her book gives a few tips, such as looking busy by always carrying a stack of files - few co-workers will notice, and those who do will be too worried about rocking the boat to complain. Given the difficulty of firing employees, she says, frustrated superiors are more likely to move such subversive workers up than out.
One might argue that Ms. Maier is supporting evil behavior, but perhaps that's not entirely the case. Her argument is largely that French companies are not meritocracies and that they do not reward work, so why bother working?
Why indeed? In a country where work is legally limited to 35 hours a week, taxes are high, and failing companies are coddled by the government, perhaps there is indeed little rational incentive to do much. Take a bit of an objectivist viewpoint for a moment. If all else fails, isn't "striking" the "right" thing to do? Is such a book not, in a way, a call to "shrug" in an environment in which no other mechanism seems effective?
I'm being slightly facetious here. It is probably a violation of one's agreement with one's employer to do nothing for one's salary, and I doubt that Ms. Maier is an objectivist of any stripe. Indeed I would expect that she is hostile to that sort of philosophy.
However, one reaps what one sows. I'm hardly surprised that a country that has long made it difficult to get ahead now finds people wondering why they should even try.