Managers across the country have been ordered to carry their monthly pay slips on foot to their nearest bank branch, a journey the national association for executive employment says will restore lost purchasing power one kilometre at a time.
The scheme, introduced this week by the Association pour l'emploi des cadres, requires senior staff in every sector to set out from their offices at dawn and walk the full distance to their branch, regardless of weather or distance. Participants must log each step in a shared ledger kept by their human resources departments, and those who arrive after noon must repeat the walk the following morning. Officials say the exercise is designed to make the cost of inflation physically visible.
The association reports that some executives in the north have already covered distances of more than three hundred kilometres, arriving at their banks with blistered feet and a renewed sense of the value of a euro. Several regional offices have been forced to relocate their headquarters closer to rail hubs so that staff can begin their journeys without losing a full working day. A spokesperson said the association's own directors would lead the first mass walk from the capital at the end of the month.
« We have calculated that a loss of eleven point six per cent is best understood by those who have had to feel it in the soles of their shoes », the spokesperson said. Critics within the sector have called the initiative exhausting, but the association insists that participation is voluntary in principle and compulsory in practice.