Who wants to get Fired?

PARIS: Mariam, a 28-year-old employee at a retail chain in France, went to great lengths to get fired.

She knew she wouldn't be eligible for unemployment payments if she simply quit. Mariam asked her company flat-out to fire her, but she was turned down. Then she simply stopped showing up for work. Her wish was granted at last - she was fired, went on the dole and found a new job six months later.

Soon, such convoluted yet surprisingly common schemes may be a thing of the past. An unusual new proposal, prompted by President Nicolas Sarkozy's push for a more flexible labour market, would allow employees to get unemployment payments even if they quit.

Business leaders and government officials brush off questions about whether this could encourage more people to go on government handouts. They insist that a variety of new reforms will work in harmony to create jobs and cut joblessness in a labour market tainted by deception and inertia.

Lawyers and observers of France's business world say people often ask their bosses to fire them instead of quitting unsatisfying jobs, because they're afraid of losing the safety net of unemployment payments and terrified of not finding another job soon. The unemployment rate stands at 8.3 per cent; the average length of unemployment is more than 9 months.

Schemes like Mariam's are a symptom of how those fears have made workers risk-averse, and of just how much France's rigid labour market needs to change. Mariam asked to be identified by her middle name only, because she lied to her new employer about how she left her last job.

'Made in China' but with warning

BEIJING: A Beijing clothing market, famous for selling fakes, has started selling its own line of brand-name products - with a warning to counterfeiters to stay away.

The Beijing Silk Street Co Ltd, which owns a multi-storey market that is filled with hundreds of clothing shops - many of which sell Burberry and Ralph Lauren fakes - has launched its own Silkstreet line of shirts, ties, scarves, teacups and other goods, the general manager of the market said Friday.

"For over 30 years, we've always been selling other people's clothes," George Wang said. "We've never sold our own."

He hopes to capitalize on the influx of foreign visitors for the Olympics.

Wang said the move was a way to start to enforce intellectual property rights and show that better quality comes with real goods.

But he warned that if anyone tried to sell fake Silkstreet goods, they will be dealt with "according to the law". Counterfeit goods remain widespread in China, despite occasional crackdowns, because laws against the practice are rarely enforced.

The market has a program to crack down on fake goods, Wang said, such as giving a 20 percent discount on rent for stalls that sell real goods.

But many of the shops in the Silkstreet market still sell fake good.

"The quality and look is good," shopkeeper Xu Meiling said of Silkstreet shirts, comparing them favorably to fake foreign-brand shirts hanging in dozens of stalls.

The new Silkstreet brand shirts go for 180 yuan (US$25, euro17). Fake Paul Smith and other name-brand shirts cost 150 yuan (US$21, euro14) for a she said.

Wang says he wants big-name brands like US apparel maker North Face, who recently won a lawsuit against the market for infringement, to open stalls in the market. So far they are "hesitant", he said, fearing their brand name will be tainted by association with the market.

In September 2006, five global luxury brand names - Burberry, Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada - won 10,000 yuan (US$1,387, EUR 940) in compensation from a joint lawsuit against Silk Street and five of its tenants, the first case in China to end in such a settlement.