Forrester's thesis is that employment as we have known it for three centuries throughout the West, has had its day and is becoming less plausible by the year as a way of distributing wealth.

L'horreur also attacks the present policies of Western governments as it makes ever more desperate attempts to keep the jobs-and-wages system alive. Forrester cites the constant downsizing of ever larger numbers of the working and, now, middle classes; the steady attrition, internationally, of welfare and union rights; and the growing destabilisation of those in work, let alone of the unemployed.

All this has created an employment and unemployment (and underemployment) culture that is not merely stressful, regrettable and unpleasant but has also, according to Forrester, "spawned an economic world that is an obscenity, an affront to human nature" and, in the words of the book's title, a "horror".

" Those in power continue to present employment as the norm and by doing so make the unemployed feel worthless. Everything of value in contemporary western society our income, our status, our contacts, our self-esteem, our power and our peace of mind is inextricably bound up with work. " The panaceas of work-experience and re-training often do nothing more than reinforce the fact that there is no real role for the unemployed. They come to realize that there is something worse than being exploited, and that is not even to be exploitable..." ˜ Viviane Forrester

"My book has brought me in touch with the powerful as well as the poor, and there is this strong feeling among political elites that you must not tell the people the truth about today's economic realities; that they just can't take it.

"In fact, I found the opposite: people aren't, in fact, afraid but they are indignant. They're not stupid, they can see what's going on, and the thing that really angers them is denial. Indeed, it's surprising how many people have told me that reading my book has actually reduced their anxieties ...

"Waiters, bankers, housewives, taxi drivers, students, young unemployed ... they say to me: `'I've had exactly the same thoughts you wrote in your book myself, for years. But it wasn't until I read L'horreur that I even realised I'd been thinking them _ let alone started taking such ideas seriously' ... "

For examples, she points to the desperate rush of French unemployed applying for the Contrat Emploi Solidarite jobs which pay half the guaranteed minimum wage, and are only part-time. Or those on workfare programmes in the US who are paid a third of union rates and have benefits docked if they are late for "work". Or those in Britain whose special economic horror is to have achieved invisibility - the "economically inactive" who don't even count as unemployed for statistical purposes.

Forrester: "The feeling that we must prove ourselves useful to society, or at least to the market economy, is rooted in the value system of a world which no longer exists. As we are unlikely ever to have a culture of full employment again, we need to stop basing our identities, individually and communally, around the idea of employment. First and foremost, the new millennium calls out for a new culture, with a new social structure which is not centred on paid employment ..."

The liberal French economist Alain Minc, who is also chairman of Le Monde, has described the book a "rubbish". He recently told Forrester: "Your book is a talented opinion poll. It is a publishing success because it plays on people's fears. But it would have sold far fewer copies if it had been signed by [Communist party leader] Robert Hue..."

Minc argues that the prosperous French workers and their unions have refused to trade some of their benefits for wider employment. Minc: "Since 1973, average purchasing power has risen by 40 per cent in real terms in France. If we had accepted a rise of only 35 per cent, there would be a million more jobs..."

Minc nevertheless concedes that Forrester has articulated a popular feeling which, for him, demonstrates "the confusion in society at large about current economic developments..."

Sources "L'horreur Economique" by Viviane Forrester published 1999 by Polity Press; The Guardian Weekly 4 November 1999 "Labour of Love" by Ian Cotton; Prospect August 1997 "Letter from Paris" by Anne-Elizabeth Moutet

Viviane Forrester on a Profound Change

For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually being exploited and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!

In democratic countries there is an urgent need for vigilance. It is often claimed that the industrial age, when a regular wage provided the means of subsistence, can somehow be patched up. But those days are over. Wage-earning is disappearing and the panoply of temporary doles and allowances designed to replace it is shrinking, something that is nothing less than criminal.

It goes hand in hand with the fear felt by the privileged who still have a paid job and are afraid of losing it. I maintain that this shame and this fear ought to be quoted on the stock exchange, because they are major inputs in profit. Once upon a time people pilloried the alienation caused by work. Today falling labour costs contribute to the profits of big companies, whose favourite management tool is sacking workers; when they do this, their stock market value soars.

Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live? — Viviane Forrester

When people talk about society's "movers and shakers", they aren't talking about the bulk of their country's population but about business leaders who relocate at the drop of a hat. Politicians make jobs their priority, but the Stock Exchange is delighted whenever a big industrial complex fires workers and gets worried whenever there's the slightest improvement in the unemployment figures. I wanted to draw people's attention to this paradox. A company's stock market quotation depends largely on labour costs, and profit is generated in the last analysis by reducing the numbers of those who have a job.

Young people live in a society which still regards salaried employment as the only acceptable, honest and lawful way of life, but most of them are deprived of the opportunity to achieve this. In deprived inner city areas this is a major problem.

At the same time I often meet young people with armfuls of degrees who are out of work. What inexcusable waste! For generations study was young people's initiation into social life. I admire young people today because they go on with their studies fully aware that they are running the risk of rejection by society.

I am not pessimistic, far from it. The pessimists are those who say there is no alternative to the present situation, that we have no choice. My book is an attempt to describe what is going on. It's true that the situation is dramatic. All the same I am, like many other people, the citizen of a country whose democratic regime makes it possible to reflect and freely resist the growing pressure that the economic factor is exerting on our lives.