French students protesting yet again over the labor law that just got passed

[OutHouse]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190458,00.html

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > U.S. & WORLD
Rioters Clash With Police in France Protests
Tuesday, April 04, 2006

PARIS ? Demonstrators opposed to a new jobs law swarmed parts of downtown Paris on Tuesday, throwing stones, tearing down street signs and ripping up park benches. Riot police, firing tear gas canisters and making several charges, carried away protesters in handcuffs.

Police said at least 1 million people poured into the streets around the country in the latest protests against the law, which makes it easier to fire young workers. Organizers said 3 million people marched.

A nationwide strike shut down the Eiffel Tower and snarled air and rail travel for the second time in a week while students barricaded themselves in schools.

It was the second time in a week that unions and student groups had succeeded in mobilizing such numbers. The largest march, in Paris, drew at least 80,000 people, while 935,000 marched in other parts of the country, police said.

Organizers put the figure in the capital at 700,000.

Violence erupted at the end of the largest protest on the fringes of working-class neighborhoods, with youths in Place d'Italie pelting police with stones, fighting and using metal bars to break up chunks of pavement that they hurled at helmeted riot officers.

One young woman twirled flaming batons. The sounds of blowing whistles were heard throughout the plaza.

Officers carrying batons and shields charged several times, making arrests.

Protesters have mounted ever-larger demonstrations for two months against the law. But President Jacques Chirac signed it anyway Sunday, saying it will help France keep pace with the global economy.

He offered modifications, but students and unions rejected them, saying they want the law withdrawn, not softened.

"What Chirac has done is not enough," said Rebecca Konforti, 18, who was among a group of students who jammed tables against the door of their high school in southern Paris to block entry. "They're not really concessions. He just did it to calm the students."

By midday, police said at least 100,000 people had hit French streets, including buoyant students parading through Marseille under a sunny southern sky and major marches from Nantes in the west to Saint-Etienne in the southeast. Protests even reached the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, where 2,000 people marched.

Some 60 students lobbed eggs and other objects at police in the northern city of Lille, and at least one person was detained.

Organizers, who said the turnout was in the hundreds of thousands, hoped it would exceed the 1 million who marched last week. The afternoon march in Paris promised to be the biggest, and the city deployed 4,000 police to avert violence that marred previous protests.

Police actively looked to thwart troublemakers. At Paris' Saint-Lazare station, riot officers with weapons and a police dog pulled over train travelers disembarking from the suburbs, searching their bags and checking identities.

Tourists, meanwhile, stood bewildered before closed gates at the Eiffel Tower. Parisian commuters flattened themselves onto limited subway trains. Garbage bins in some Paris neighborhoods stood overflowing and uncollected by striking sanitation workers.

Irish budget airline Ryanair canceled all its flights in and out of France.

The strike appeared weaker, however, than last week's action. Signs of a possible breakthrough began to emerge as labor leaders suggested they could hold talks with lawmakers after Tuesday's demonstrations.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin devised the disputed "first job contract" as a bid to boost the economy and stem chronic youth unemployment. He maintains it would encourage hiring by allowing employers to fire workers under 26 during their first two years on a job without giving a reason.

The measure is meant to cut a 22 percent unemployment rate among youths that reaches 50 percent in some poor, heavily immigrant neighborhoods. Villepin has cited the national statistics agency as saying it would create up to 80,000 new jobs at zero cost to the state.

Critics say it threatens France's hallmark labor protections, and the crisis has severely damaged Villepin's political reputation.

Chirac stepped in Friday to order two major modifications ? reducing a trial period of two years to one year and forcing employers to explain any firings ? in hopes of defusing the crisis. In so doing, he dealt a blow to Villepin, his one-time top aide and apparent choice as successor next year.

In an apparent first in France, Chirac signed the original measure into law this weekend, as promised, but also effectively suspended it with an order that it not be applied. The 73-year-old president's legal sleight of hand kept the law alive while a new version is in the works.

Now that the law has been signed, protesters have less maneuvering room. The government appeared to be hoping that protests would die down after Tuesday's big event and was looking to possible talks between more moderate unions and lawmakers led by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarkozy, a leading presidential hopeful, is the only senior government official unscathed by the crisis.

The head of the governing UMP party's bloc in parliament, Bernard Accoyer, told reporters he had invited labor leaders to talks.

Two labor leaders ? CFDT union chief Francois Chereque and CGT union chief Bernard Thibault ? suggested they would attend. But both said they hoped the law eventually would be rejected.

 

[Martin]

here's an interesting piece that goes into more depth (I'm pasting it, since it may require subscription)

A tale of two Frances

Mar 30th 2006 | PARIS
From The Economist print edition
A war may be needed to bring the two together, but this is not the right battle
MAXPPP

A FAMILIAR story is once again grabbing headlines in France. In March, the Paris bourse soared to its highest level since 2001. Latest financial results show record profits for the country's top 40 companies in 2005, up 50% on 2004. Last year, French companies were the world's third-biggest source of global cross-border takeovers. From banking to telecoms, cosmetics to glassmaking, corporate France is in expansionist mood, gleefully striding into new markets, trampling over competitors and exploiting the globalised economy.

Not exactly the image that France is currently beaming around the world. Some 1m-3m people took to the streets on March 28th in the biggest single day of strikes and demonstrations that the country has seen for well over a decade. Train drivers, postmen, teachers, tax inspectors, gas and electricity workers and civil servants joined the work stoppage, in protest against a new labour law, bringing chaos to cities across France. For most of the day, the mood was more festive than hostile, with protesters blowing whistles, beating drums, wearing orange wigs or rollerblades; one was dressed, bare-breasted, as Marianne; one carried a lavatory seat with a photo of the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, pasted inside.

In Paris, the streets filled with students and trade unionists, and then with smoke and tear gas, as riot police tried to contain the violence that broke out later at the Place de la République. Some 488 people were arrested in the capital, most of them troublemakers rather than students. Only days earlier, a previous day of protest that also turned nasty ended with torched cars in a posh bit of central Paris. Since the start of March, nearly 500 policemen have been wounded in the demonstrations, more than during last autumn's riots.

Tuesday was the culmination of a seven-week protest against the contrat première embauche, a private-sector ?first job contract? for the under 26s, known in France as the CPE. It was devised by Mr de Villepin to try to combat mass unemployment in France, which touches 23% of young people, and one in two of those living on the rough housing projects in the banlieues or suburbs. The idea was to encourage employers to create jobs, particularly for ill-qualified youngsters living on such estates, by giving them a two-year trial period during which flexible redundancy rules apply, after which full job protection kicks in. Students, however, denounced the measure as ?institutionalising insecurity? and victimising the young. What started as a student-led anti-CPE protest has since broadened into a symbolic stand-off with Mr de Villepin: a pre-emptive protectionist strike.

Mr de Villepin has handled this effort to introduce more labour-market flexibility with lamentable imperiousness, pushing a bill through parliament by decree without consulting the unions or allowing a full debate. But the underlying confrontation he has provoked is overdue: the need for France to face up to, and accept, global capitalism. For what unites the trade unionists and civil servants (most of whom are untouched by the new contract) and the students (many of whom will be over 26 by the time they reach the job market) is an overwhelming conservatism: a desire to cling to an idealised world of jobs for life that their parents used to enjoy, combined with a denial of the constraints that a globalised economy imposes.

Yet the paradox behind the current turmoil is that this France, which cowers before the threat of globalisation, co-exists with the other?the dynamic, highly trained, private-sector France?which is marching brazenly wherever globalisation allows. These are the two halves of today's France, which inhabit quite separate worlds, which speak quite different languages and which, almost uniquely in Europe, seem to be drifting farther apart.
Protesters v investors

When Mr de Villepin recently sought a meeting with some calm-minded non-revolting students, his options were pretty slim. The national student unions refused to talk to him. A swelling student rebellion had already led to campus sit-ins and blockades at over half the country's 84 universities. So where could Mr de Villepin find the amenable sort? The answer was a quick walk down the road from Matignon, the prime minister's mansion, to the Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques, known as Sciences Po. Students at this elite internationally minded college, whose alumni include Mr de Villepin, were quite happy to chat to the former pupil, fully aware of what is at stake for France.

One of the arresting features of the current student movement is how little it has touched France's grandes écoles. Sciences Po, a feeder college for these elite schools, has seen nothing of the violence or forced blockades of nearby Paris universities, such as the Sorbonne. Nor have most of the country's top undergraduate business or engineering schools, such as Polytechnique, HEC or ESSEC. Students at such places, taught the latest in finance and economics, understand the price France will pay if it refuses to change. These are the well-trained graduates snapped up by banks in London and New York which are only too happy to benefit from what France does best, and by those French companies now busy exploiting globalisation with such aplomb.

These two faces of France are separated early in the country's two-tier higher education system. At the top, the grandes écoles cater to a small minority and are highly selective: would-be pupils spend at least a year in a preparatory class just to take the entrance exam. While the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) is the best-known (and arguably the least well-adapted to the global economy), it recruits only a tiny share of the total. The rest are autonomous, and highly specialised in areas such as engineering or business. And employers pay a premium to hire their graduates. A recent study by Le Nouvel Observateur magazine showed that 96% of graduates from top engineering schools were placed two years later in permanent jobs, earning an average of ?30,400 ($36,600). By contrast. only 45% of university psychology graduates had found permanent jobs by the same stage, and their average income was ?19,000.

The majority of students attend universities that do not select on entry and are virtually free (fees are currently under ?200 a year). Any school-leaver with the baccalauréat is granted a place. Students are packed into overcrowded lecture halls: France spends less per undergraduate each year than it does per high-school pupil. Lecturers are civil servants, employed by the national Ministry of Education. Universities have little autonomy. And much research is done elsewhere, at the national research institutes. Little wonder that France's undergraduate drop-out rate is about two-fifths and that, in the latest global ranking by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, not a single French university appeared in the top 40.

If the grandes écoles students have little to worry about, university students are right to be fearful. Young French people not only face a woefully high unemployment rate, they also find it difficult to break out of a cycle of back-to-back short-term contracts. Over 64% of French 15-24-year-olds in work are on temporary contracts one year after leaving education. The reason that these jobs are the best on offer is that permanent jobs are so protected, with complicated and uncertain redundancy rules, that employers hesitate to hire. This is precisely why Mr de Villepin wanted to loosen the firing rules for the young.

The potential trade-off?between less security and more jobs?is not the way the students see it. Nor does public opinion: polls show a majority against the CPE. Many of this week's demonstrators carried banners denouncing not just the new contract, but other liberal evils, such as globalisation and the free market. ?I have never felt France so tense and tormented,? said Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and head of the ruling UMP party. This fear for the future is what distinguishes today's student-led rebellion from that of a generation ago. ?May '68 was an offensive movement, carrying a positive vision of the future,? Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the 1968 student leader turned Green Euro-politician, told Paris-Match magazine: ?Today's protests are based on the defensive, the fear of insecurity and of change.?

Why do the French seem to fear capitalism? The country's republican revolutionary history bequeathed faith in a strong dirigiste state as a civic religion. Today, nearly 5m French workers, or one-quarter of all jobs, are still in the public sector. Left-leaning intellectuals, with a romantic communist heritage, are not derided but treated as national treasures. There is a lingering culture of suspicion of profit, and a demonisation of business leaders, encouraged by a mainstream left that still equates efficiency with injustice.

The Socialist Party, for instance, is committed to renationalising Electricité de France (EDF), the state electricity utility, which was partly floated last year. The Communist Party, with its hammer and sickle flag and its grip on the biggest trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail, is considered part of the mainstream left. Only assorted Trotskyites and Revolutionary Communists earn a place on the fringe. As François Bayrou, a centrist political leader, once put it: ?France has never been properly déMarxisé.?
Let's go for le Happy Meal

Yet are the French really as anti-capitalist as they like to think? Take a closer look at what they do, rather than what they say, and things seem a little different. When EDF was floated, over 5m French individuals snapped up the chance to become a shareholder. Vandals near the Sorbonne smashed the glass front of a McDonald's restaurant during the student protests, yet the French are calm about enjoying ?le Happy Meal? with their children, and many students work there part-time. Indeed, the American group recently reported strong operating profit for the fourth quarter of 2005 based partly on its huge success in France. Many of the petty thieves infiltrating the current protests are out to snatch the latest Samsung or Nokia mobile telephones, fashion accessory of choice for students in France like anywhere else. The French, it seems, condemn capitalism during office hours, but are quite happy to consume its products at the weekend.

Within the private sector, the rules of globalised capitalism are well accepted. France is less unionised than America, and very few days are lost to strikes. Per hour, French workers are more productive than their American counterparts?though they lose out on overall productivity because, thanks to the 35-hour week, they work so few hours. And young French people snap up the loosely protected jobs in bars and cafés in London, the sort that are being protested about so vigorously in Paris.

Who then is to blame for the gap between the rhetoric and the reality? The short answer is a political class that has repeatedly failed to explain to the French what is at stake and why things need to change. For the past 20 years, the mainstream political choice has been between a form of socio-Gaullism embodied by President Jacques Chirac (who last year described liberalism as a greater threat than communism) and an archaic socialism that fails to understand, or at least to explain, that wealth needs to be created before it can be shared. Such reforms as France has carried out tend to have been introduced by stealth, both by the left and the right. Lionel Jospin, a Socialist ex-prime minister, for instance, managed to privatise whole swathes of industry without ever using the word.

The result, however, is that the credibility of the political word has been undermined. As Michel Camdessus, a former IMF director and author of a devastating criticism of the French model in 2004, put it: ?Reform in our country still moves forward with its face masked. Certainly we take action, but we never say why.? So when Mr de Villepin promised last year to keep a 70% holding in Gaz de France (GDF) as a condition of its partial flotation, employees disbelieved him. Instead, they took to the streets to contest what they suspected was a first step towards privatisation. Sure enough, when Suez, a private French company, faced an expected hostile bid from an Italian firm in February, Mr de Villepin stepped in and orchestrated a merger with GDF?even though that will shrink the state's share to about a third.

Where was the politician ready to argue that a Franco-Italian merger could create a new European energy giant, rather than fend off outsiders at any cost? Why was there not a murmur when BNP Paribas, a French bank, marched into Italy earlier that month and picked up an Italian one? Or when L'Oréal, a cosmetics giant, recently snared Body Shop, an iconic British chain. Capitalism, judging by the rhetoric, is for the French only when it suits.

Were all this simply political theatre, it might be little more than a distraction. But the failure to explain is also a failure to create the consensus needed for reform. And the longer reform is postponed, the more painful it will be. The weight of the state, which raises too many taxes, to pay too many civil servants and implement too many rules, is already a drag on economic growth. The French government's overall tax take is 44% of GDP, next to a euro-zone average of 39.5%. The economy grew by a mere 1.4% in 2005, and is only slowly picking up this year. All the while, France is piling up unsustainable debt to prop up its sprawling welfare system. Michel Pébereau, chairman of BNP Paribas, pointed out in a government-commissioned report that if nothing is done about the government debt, it will soar from 66% of GDP today to 100% in 2014. The net result will be a ?foreseeable reduction of our capacity to create jobs and wealth.?
To the barricades

How will the current stand-off be resolved? Mr de Villepin insisted this week that he was open only to ?amendments? of the CPE, such as a shortening of the two-year trial period, but would not withdraw it. The unions are also in no mood to give ground. ?The government?, Pierre Lellouche, a UMP deputy, told Le Figaro this week, ?is stuck between capitulation and collective suicide.?
EPA Sarkozy (left) is smug that he would have done things better than de Villepin

In the short run, there seem to be only two ways out of this impasse that would enable Mr de Villepin to rescue at least a shred of credibility. Either the Constitutional Council might decide that the law is illegal in a ruling due on March 30th: Socialist deputies have filed an appeal on the grounds of ?inequality?. Or Mr Chirac, who is expected to make a statement in the next day or two, could decide not to promulgate the law until the two sides decide to sit down and talk.

Even if the law is put on hold, and negotiations start again, the question about France's willingness to modernise will remain. Will France have ducked its ?Thatcher moment?, the point when the country might have tested the union-led resistance and imposed liberal economics on a fearful public?

One trouble is that Mr de Villepin's CPE, while welcome, is not the radical liberal overhaul that the labour market needs and which would deserve this sort of confrontation. No change is envisaged to the high social charges employers pay for each employee, nor to the high minimum wage; redundancy rules for permanent jobs remain untouched. Nor is Mr de Villepin, a romantic idealist and part-time poet who admires Napoleon and de Gaulle in equal measure, a convincing liberal figure.

Which is why some reform-minded deputies fret that Mr de Villepin's war of attrition could make it more difficult for France to attempt anything genuinely radical in the future. Supporters of Mr Sarkozy, who like Mr de Villepin is an aspirant candidate at next year's presidential election (and who preaches a ?rupture? with France's social model), tend to regard this as a fruitless trial run that is not worth the political capital. Mr Sarkozy has been careful to distance himself from the prime minister, calling early on for the CPE to be put on hold while negotiations take place.

Had the parliamentary party, and the government, been united behind the prime minister, this stand-off might have been avoided. But underlying the bungled CPE affair is the corrosive power struggle that pits the prime minister against his number two. Mr de Villepin's desire to force through the CPE was guided by his need to establish himself as a man of action, not just of letters, and therefore as a potential candidate for 2007.

Appointed only last May, he had little time to put his plans into place, and in his haste he failed to prepare public opinion or the unions for what he was trying to do. By treating parliament as a plaything, to be dropped at whim, and the unions as optional, he has ended up looking like yet another in a line of aloof political leaders exploiting a system of highly centralised power to impose their way.

Naturally, Mr Sarkozy has lost no opportunity to remind the French that he would have handled things better. ?It is not change that the French refuse,? he declared in a speech this week, ?but reform that they consider unfair.? As both men's popularity sink in the polls, however, the greater threat to both is not each other. It is that their self-destructive rivalry enfeebles the political right, and that, in 2007, the Socialists end up victorious.

 

[Meuge]

It's not France if half the country isn't on strike. They won't rest until they have a 40 hour/month work schedule, with 3 months of paid vacation per year, and an option to strike at any time.

 

[palehorse]

Originally posted by: Meuge
It's not France if half the country isn't on strike. They won't rest until they have a 40 hour/month work schedule, with 3 months of paid vacation per year, and an option to strike at any time.

lol. QFT!

 

[Amplifier]

France has a new generation of wimps! Enjoy making 40% less than Americas :beer:

 

[Todd33]

They need to take the age limit off the new law, make it fair. Fire anyone in the first two years...

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I bet these guys would protest against mass immigration and foreign outsourcing. Could you imagine how much protest we would have on these issues if Americans were merely 1/4 as concerned about their own job markets and economic well being?