Vu d'ailleurs (pour ceux qui prendraient goût à l'IHT): French protests, again

French protests, again

International Herald TribuneTUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2006

For the second time in four months, French streets are filled with riot police, tear gas and rampaging youths. But the similarity between then and now is deceptive. Back in November, it was the sons of North African immigrants in their dreary suburbs exploding in frustration at lack of jobs, prospects or programs. This time, privileged university students are protesting what they see as an assault on the job security that they consider their birthright. The connection between the two waves of unrest is that the labor reform to which the students are so opposed was proposed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as a partial answer to those who set fire to the suburbs.

A new law essentially allows companies to fire workers under 26 within the first two years of employment without having to give a reason. The idea is to encourage employers to hire youths on a trial or temporary basis. There is an obvious downside: young workers could be fired on a whim, or simply to make room for another wave of disposable workers. But the alternative is the current state of affairs, in which jobs are sinecures. Unemployment is at 22.2 percent among the young and close to 40 percent in the poor suburbs, compared to 9.6 percent nationwide.
Villepin, a patrician notoriously deaf to the streets, did a bad job of presenting and selling the law to the students, the unions and the general public. The unions are now threatening a general strike unless Villepin backs down, the prime minister's ratings are plunging, and politicians of all stripes are pouncing on him as support for the protests grows. But his law is a valid and necessary attempt to remedy a serious problem, and the reaction of the students, and of labor unions ready to leap on any pretense for a show of force, is selfish and out of line.

Resistance to the law has been based less on practical pros and cons than on a knee-jerk defense of the job security that the French, or at least those who have a job, hold sacred. That has created widespread support for the protests. In the suburbs that the law was meant to help, unemployed youths fear that if they did get a job, they would be at higher risk than other workers of losing it because of racial discrimination or other factors.

However dramatic the images of the disturbances, the clashes have been localized and relatively brief, the damage far less than last November, the police restrained. Before it gets any worse, students should stop defending their privileges and heed President Jacques Chirac's call for a creative dialogue about how they can help resolve the real problem facing their generation.