Up to 1.5 million people—400,000 in Paris alone—took to the streets throughout France on Saturday to protest proposed changes in French labor law that would make it easier to fire workers under the age of 26. The demonstrations capped a week of intensifying protests which shut down the majority of French universities and brought out 250,000 students out to protests on Thursday. Saturday’s demonstrations drew students and workers from a broad cross section of the French workforce.
Saturday’s demonstrations revived the powerful alliance of workers and students that rocked France before in 1968 and 1994. All of the major unions and student organizations turned out for the demonstrations.
Bernard Thibault, the head of the CGT, France’s biggest union, said, “If they don’t listen to us, we are going to have to think about moving to a general strike across the entire country.” Student leaders vowed to continue their fight, as well, until the law is repealed. A major day of protest has been scheduled for March 28 if the government does not withdraw the law.
The immediate issue is a new law that was pushed through the French Parliament without debate by the conservative government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. The law would change France’s Code du Travail, the labor law build up over the 20th century that essentially grants “just cause” rights to French workers in standard jobs after a brief probation period. That means that employers cannot simply fire workers for no reason.
The changes would allow employers to dump workers under 26 years of age for any reason during the first two years of employment.
The government claims that the new law would increase youth employment by encouraging employers to hire young workers since they could fire them easily if they didn’t work out or were not needed. According to the government, this would especially help minority youths in places like Paris’s suburbs where widespread rioting occurred in October.
According to official statistics, France’s youth unemployment rate is 22%, a figure regularly repeated in the press, compared with 11% in the UK and 13% in Germany. But in an interesting article in the Financial Times (FT March 18, 2006), the paper’s statistician reports that these figures are misleading and that the actual rate of unemployment is closer to 7.8% in France, 7.4% in the UK, and 6.5% in Germany. That’s because the figures do not take into account the number of young people that go on to higher education and therefore stay out of the labor market longer. Since France has a very large number of workers in one form of higher education or another, the figures are skewed in a way that makes the youth unemployment rate seem much higher than it is. France does differ from the UK and Germany in that it takes longer for French students to get jobs after graduation.
The government has called the new law, the “First Job Contract” but students have dubbed it the “Kleenex contract” since it would allow employers to dump young workers like used tissue.
Protesters argue that the new law is another milestone in the growth of contingent and precarious work. Over the past decade there has been an enormous growth in temporary, part-time and precarious employment in France. Take a walk through many neighborhoods in Paris and you will see scores of offices for temp agencies—many like US-based Manpower and Swiss-based Adecco—are familiar to US workers. In fact, while US-based Manpower Inc. may be one of the biggest employers in the US, the company does even more business in France.
Up to 70% of young people currently work under some kind of precarious or short-term agreement. And the growth of precarious work generally is a major issue in France. Unions, immigrant organizations, and youth groups, have mounted protests against the trend for years. But the move to essentially codify precarious work across the board could wipe out any chance that young people have of finding steady employment and that has galvanized the entire workforce.
M.O.
(First of a series on the French situation, coming blogs: The failure of the French Government’s attempt to divide workers;what lessons can US and other workers learn from the protests; and more)
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