How does Monaco Get All the Work Done During France’s Train Strikes

There are about 10.000 Monegasques and 40.000 residents in the Principality.

How does the Principality with all these 50.000 people living here get all the work that needs to get done completed?

Certainly the Monégasques alone need help to do it because only about half of them are of working age and only about half of those work in Monaco. 

It needs about 55.000 employees in the private sector hard at work each day to keep the Principality functioning well. So if only about 2.500 Monegasques are hard at it, and only about 1000 of these in the private sector, from where do the enterprises in the Principality employ all the rest. 

After all where do all the housekeepers, drivers, cooks, maids, bodyguards, carers, governesses and butlers come from? It takes between 3000 and 4000 of these “house staff” alone to run the households of wealthy residents. And that’s just a small portion of the total work that is going on.

Well you can’t help but notice the influx each day to Monte Carlo station of full to the brim train carriages from Ventimiglia on the Italian border and all the bordering French communities in the direction of Nice … and of course from very close-by from Beausoleil and Cap d’Ail. 

Can you guess what proportion of all these commuters are coming from the direction of Italy as opposed to France. 

You would be wrong if you thought the majority come from Italy. Statistics (including those from the Monegasque Institute of Statistics for Economic Studies) show a little under a sixth or 8.500 coming from Italy each day and just under two thirds or 35.000 are coming from France. 

So when the French trains are impacted by strike action, for example over the latest changes in pensions, you’ll see those commuting numbers fall to a trickle temporarily and a lot of work stalled. Even some of the bank staff will have trouble getting to work to help us customers. 

In the order of less than 10.000 live very close, in Beausoleil and Cap d’Ail and about 5000 live in Monaco itself, but that leaves a great majority heavily affected by the trains and buses. So every time there is a wave of unrest in France in the transport sector, Monaco feels it. And just announced is yet another wave of unrest impacting French trains on May 31st to April 2nd. 

Not all is bad news… in the last year the strength of Monaco’s economy meant that over 2000 extra employees had to be hired. And while the majority may be French, Italian, Portuguese and Monegasque, just like the cosmopolitan composition of residents there are well over 100 nationalities represented in the workforce.