Long Drive Home
January 22, 2008
For the past 26 years, Georgette Marmillot has made the 75-minute commute from her village in the French province of Alsace to the city of Karlsruhe in Germany's south-west where she is employed as a secretary.
French-born Marmillot originally took the job because back in the early 1980s, there was simply nothing available in Alsace. Now, she likes her job at the European School too much to even consider looking for a position closer to home.
Marmillot isn't alone. An estimated 28,000 people cross daily from Alsace into Germany's Upper Rhine region bordering France, according to Baden-Württemberg's state bureau of statistics. The traffic, however, typically flows in one direction -- only 300 people commute across the border from Germany into Alsace.
The trans-frontier commuting from Alsace started in the 1960s and 1970s, when, as a result of Germany's "economic miracle," companies located on the Upper Rhine were screaming out for workers. Because many French people living near the border speak Alsatian, a German dialect, Alsace became a popular recruitment area.
Alsace workers popular in Germany
"A significant majority" of the 900 workers at Michelin's plant in Karlsruhe commute from Alsace, according to the company's spokesperson Jan Hennen.
"The plant has been operating here for more than 40 years and we have some families where the third generation is now working for us," he said, adding that although most of the Alsace workers spoke German, signs throughout the plant were also written in French for safety reasons.
The first wave of workers commuting from Alsace tended to be young males without a tertiary education who worked on the factory assembly lines. Over the past decades this has changed and French commuters are now much more mixed in their background and education.
This tendency is evident at the two Mercedes-Benz plants located in the German border towns of Wörth and Rastatt where workers from Alsace are employed in all areas, a company spokesperson said.
One of these employees is Georgette Marmillot's husband, Jean Pierre. Although working in Germany means getting out of bed at 3:15 a.m. to make it on time for the early shift, he said he isn't about to look for a job in France any time soon.
More money at the end of the month
"I could find a job in France, but why bother," he said. "I get paid a great salary, I enjoy my job and I don't mind commuting for an hour to get there."
Not only are wages in Germany significantly higher than in France, there are other advantages to living in France and working in Germany for the so-called frontaliers who live within 30 km (19 miles) of the border. They pay their income tax in France where the rate is lower than in Germany, but they pay German social security contributions, which are considerably less than the French payments.
According to real estate agent Hans-Peter Scholl, who has been selling properties in Alsace for more than 20 years, there have always been a small group of Francophile Germans who want to move to France simply because they love the language and culture.
New German immigrants turn back on France
However, the lure of tax savings and cheaper housing prices have more recently led another type of German to pack up home and buy a property across the border. Over the past two decades, an estimated 15,000 Germans have moved to Alsace but commute back across the border for work.
"This group really only sleep in France; their focus is still Germany," Scholl said. "They work in Germany, go shopping in Germany and belong to a German sports club, so they don’t really have much contact [with the French]."
Because they often neglect their new community, some of these immigrants have caused "friction" with the French, Scholl said, although he quickly added that the Alsace locals were generally extremely friendly and very helpful -- "much more so than in Germany."
As for the French, they simply aren't interested in moving to the other side of border. There is virtually no demand among the French for German properties, except in the region adjoining the Alsace state capital of Strasbourg. This new phenomenon is only because Strasbourg's prices have leapt to exorbitant levels in the past couple of years, driven up by high European Union salaries.
As for Georgette Marmillot, despite spending more than two and a half hours a day commuting over the border, living in Germany is absolutely out of the question.
"God save me," she said. "I like working here or I wouldn't make the long drive every day, but Germans are too bossy to live here. They always think they have to tell you what to do and how it should be done."