A Tax on Trash and other Trucs

*Truc is French for "thing" or "stuff." It's the sort of word that causes teachers to wince when it is employed by their students, but is considered a perfectly acceptable catch-all in casual contexts.

First of all, it finally snowed! Okay, so it happened once before, back in December, but it was so fleeting that it seemed like it didn't happen at all. This snow has lasted two full days, so I think it counts. Tuesday morning I woke up to this outside my window:

Tuesday morning was a lazy one; all but one of my classes was canceled due to a big teachers’ strike. A couple of weeks ago, the French government announced it would be eliminating 42 posts in the département du Doubs (equivalent to Doubs county), including one post in each of my two schools. There were protests this past weekend and a big national strike organized for Tuesday. All but three of the teachers at École Champagne participated in the strike. So what happened to the kids whose teachers weren’t at school? Normally the city provides a kind of group day-care at the maisons du quartier (neighborhood community centers, similar to YMCAs). But none was offered this time at the maison du quartier in Planoise, where my schools are located, so parents without cars were in a jam. Presumably they left their kids with friends or family, or stayed home from work. This kind of large-scale hassle is of course the goal of a strike.

On one level, I can sympathize with the teachers because I have seen the law of diminishing returns at work when it comes to overcrowded classrooms, and I know that the removal of another teacher from the schools where I teach will only exacerbate that problem. But it would be interesting to compare the amount of money spent on dealing with the consequences of the strike (such as the price of employing people for daycare) with the amount the government plans to save by eliminating posts throughout the country. Thought for the day: what are the costs and benefits of a system in which strikes are permissible, and their consequences are paid for by the taxpayers?

This is the salle des maîtres (teachers' lounge) at Ecole Champagne... I took advantage of it being empty to snap a pic! 

Now onto this entry’s title: my roommates Steph and Charly announced earlier this week that as of February 1, Besançon will institute a weight-based trash tax. As of now, households pay a flat tax to the city to have their trash collected. Our apartment building’s residents split that tax based on the square footage of each apartment. But starting this week, our building will be taxed based on how many kilograms of refuse are in our trash container.

This concept, of course, presents all kinds of unintended consequences. I suggested people might start throwing their trash in the recycling bins, since there are no fees for recycled material. Steph replied that the plan calls for the trash collectors to check the recycling bins at the same time they collect the trash, and if they see trash inside they will add the entire contents of the recycling bin to that household’s trash count. This creates the desired negative incentive against residents disposing of trash in the recycling bins, although costing the garbage collectors who-knows-how-much time to check each bin. 

Another possible consequence: people will start throwing their trash in their neighbors’ bins. Response: we're getting a lock for ours. Not very charming, but I suppose it will be effective. A third possible consequence: people will start dumping their trash in parks or public places to avoid paying the tax. Not sure how they’re going to avoid this one. I suggested people might also try to dispose of their trash at their workplace, although I can’t say I considered that option for myself (can you imagine me carrying our trash on my 45-minute bus commute to Planoise?) We’ll see if the trash tax lasts...

One more quick thing. I saw a t-shirt in a store window a while ago and have wanted to put it on my blog ever since. Keep in mind this store doesn't seem to sell the classiest garments ever, so I doubt their design team really dedicated a lot of time to their translation. But still... So the shirt features a woman's face, artfully silhouetted and set at an angle across the whole front of the shirt. The material is white and the image and writing are a silvery gray. At the bottom is written: "Yoo're God's great paramour and sweet." Wha??? I have no idea what they meant to say, but whatever it was, they failed.

Another linguistic truc: I have a little "1 Minute a Day for Correct French" calendar made by the "For Dummies" people and it recently featured the word antonomase, whose English equivalent is "antonomasia." Still lost? It's the term for a proper noun which becomes so fully integrated into a language that it becomes a common noun. Think "Kleenex" or "Wellingtons." The examples my little calendar sheet gave me were les poubelles (apparently Mr. Poubelle, the prefect of Paris at the time, required garbage cans to be placed in the city streets in 1884 and they were named after him) and la silhouette (Mr. Silhouette, the Finance minister under Louis XV wanted to raise taxes on the rich and took a leave of absence after doing so, lending his name to the nebulous outline of an image). The term in English can also be used to describe a phrase which becomes inextricably linked with a personage (think "The Bard" for William Shakespeare or "The Gipper" for Ronald Reagan). 

So there's your French/English lesson for the day. Hope you're all well!