The veil has lifted

I have tasted the bitter brew of expatriate exploitation. The start-up company that hired me last summer turned out to be experts in deception and the inner-workings of French bureaucracy. They looked great on paper - a shimmery white variety with a colorful logo that attracted my inexperienced, financially insecure eye. They talked the talk of bourgeois French marketing specialists and walked the walk in suede Dior heels well enough to convince me to work for them "sans papiers". All this under the assumption that they needed my expertise in the classroom at the start of school.

I fell under their spell and worked my measly 12 hour shifts with the private school brats, all the while expecting my employers to follow-through on their end of the deal and officially sponsor me. With three exhausting months of classroom time under my belt and still no work visa I began to panic. The red flags were everywhere as I wrestle with the beast that is French administration, trying desperately to get a straight answer. The answer came on the last day of November when I was called in for a meeting with my femmes fatales employers and got fired. No papers, no visa, no job, no rights to unemployment. The veil had lifted and the sight was ugly as hell.



These women knew exactly what they were doing all along. They hired me to get their company off the ground (cheaply) only to fire me once they knew they'd have to pay the government to sponsor me. Up until that point, however, I was cheap EMT labor, period. They went so far as to invite the French woman who would replace me to one of my classes to observe, to my horror, one of my worst performances as a teacher to date. I shook the woman's hand tentatively, smelling conspiracy in the air like a toxic chemical. But by then it was too late. The avalanche had been set in motion and I was the poor fool trapped in its path.

By firing me before December and the holiday season, the women craftily avoided paying any vacation time, getting the best deal possible. I have spent the subsequent months trying to reassemble some sense of dignity and to get a visitor's visa while looking for work in a country with 10% unemployment, where graduates of the Grands Ecoles went on strike. French students are in the streets protesting the same policies that caused my exploitation and in which their job prospects look even worse than mine. This is no laughing matter.

So I've been had à la français and I am the wiser for it. I can now sniff out a bad deal a mile away and I assure you that I shall never be had again. Now if I could only afford to hire a trained assassin . . .