In the Guardian: Mass protests in France.

Declinology a Libération editor in the Guardian.

[ 29 March 2006: Message edited by: lagatta ]

That one with the PCF march: isn't that an anarchist in the foreground? Looks like a not-too-subtle putdown of the PCF by the photographer to me.

Pro-PS, new left or internationalist, every journal I know from France sees la Patrie as the nombril du monde. Not similar to Canadians.
In Can classrooms (and CBC I'd say) since the 1980s, as voice of the damned just described his high school social studies unit, we get another mix:

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If I had to speculate about what ideology, if any was being promoted, I'd guess it was some sort of liberal "middle of the road" internationalist Keynesianism.

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My reading of Guardian's piece by the Liberation staffer is as a dodge of any outsider's view that the French nation is in free-fall. He warns us that such fatalism is the fodder the Right is trying to feed us. Not very subtle, sort of thread drift, not worth printing it, but the Guardian Unlimited did.

]Agence France-Presse

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Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a presidential hopeful who has contested the employment law introduced by his rival Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, went to the Place de la Republic to show support to riot police.

He was met with shouts of "Sarkozy resign!" and "Sarkozy, f**k your mother!" from groups of youths.

Mr Sarkozy, who riled rioters with his aggressive stance during violence in November 2005 in high-immigrant Paris suburbs plagued by unemployment, urged police to arrest as many troublemakers as possible.

At least one million people, by police estimate, participated in marches nationwide against the labour law, which was created to encourage companies to hire workers aged under 26 but also makes it easier to fire them.

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The law creating the First Employment Contract (Contrat Premiere Embauche or CPE) was passed by parliament as part of a broader bill on equal opportunities which will come into effect in April.

The CPE is a new work contract for under-26s with a two-year trial period. In that period, employers can terminate the contract without having to offer an explanation or give prior warning. For other employees, the trial period is usually 1-3 months.
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I detest initialisms, letter strings, because they give me problems. In this thread, CPE should be clear. As you know, CPE also stands for daycare places under the Quebec gov't centres de petite enfance and Charest is moving ahead with cutbacks in daycare: a very big issue here for us. So seeing CPE anywhere I think of daycare cutbacks first, France second.

[ 30 March 2006: Message edited by: goyanamasu ]

But after all, we are both fighting pour des acquis sociaux which the neoliberals are trying to strip away...

Funny, the CPE would leave young French workers with no more employment rights ... than any workers in Québec ... and I fear our employment standards act (Loi sur les normes du travail) is among the strongest in North America. Just a sign of how few rights workers have on this continent, though I know some people, even on this board, seem happy about that.

There was some talk about the US debt on the last thread. To clarify where the US debt is at, may I suggest this.

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NEW YORK (AFP) - Tick, 20,000 dollars, tock, another 20,000 dollars.

So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York's Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they struggle to keep pace.

The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion -- or more precisely 8,310,200,545,702 -- dollars ... and counting.

But it's not big enough.

Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.

The clock's owner, real estate developer Douglas Durst, knew such a problem could arise but hadn't counted on it so soon.

"We really expected it to be quite some time," Durst told AFP. "But now, with the pace of debt growth only increasing, we're looking at maybe two years and certainly before President (George W.) Bush leaves office in 2009."

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Last week, the "family share" readout on the clock stood some loose change short of 90,000 dollars.

03/27/2006 21:23

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The idea that labor protections are the cause of European unemployment is part of an overall myth that Europeans would benefit from a more American-style economy. The U.S. economy is said to be more competitive, yet we are running a record trade deficit of more than 6 percent of GDP, and the European Union is running a trade surplus. The U.S. economy is supposedly more dynamic, but French productivity is actually higher than ours. ... French students and workers seem to have a better understanding of these economic issues than their political leaders. Hopefully, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail.

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Originally posted by goyanamasu:
Sven, why are you surprised by that? Serious.

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Originally posted by Sven:

I thought the government would fold under the protests. One way or another, if the vast majority want the law eliminated, it's not going to last (so, why bother implement it in the first place?).

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Originally posted by goyanamasu:
My retort: the French (especially not Chirac) are not pragmatic. I was taught that in school. Now we're getting our object lesson in what this mean I guess.

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If trouble broke out in Mexico and the matter was not resolved immediately, the stereotypical image some would drag out is that this is a Mexican stand-off.

One image of France that sticks in my head is from the general strike, in 1937 I believe it was. Many labour reforms flowed from this action and were revived a little more than 10 years after.

It seems natural to me that the French syndicats attempt to make enough of a struggle over CPE that it does look like a plebiscite in the streets for job security.

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Originally posted by Radical Progressive:
With such high unemployment rates, especially among the young, something will have to be done.
- Overall unemployment rate 9.6%
- Under-25 unemployment rate 22.2%

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Originally posted by Fidel:

But Newfoundland has 20 percent youth unemployment, and they can't blame unions or the NDP out there. The reason for "lower" U rates in North America is "flexible" labour markets and the acceptance of higher rates of poverty. It's more difficult for workers to qualify as unemployed in North America since the 1980's after conservative and liberal governments basically copied the USian model. So like the American's, we tend to want to hide our unemployment and poverty behind bullshit statistics and outright lies about full-time payroll job creation since FTA. IOW's, they can fool the typical conservative and liberal voters, but they can't fool the left.

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Too true.
I mean, what about people with no fixed address, or in prisons, or working only several months of the year (like some fishermen out here)

Statistics, statistics...guaranteed the real unemployment rate, the one that only includes liveable wages, is double or triple the official figure here in N.A.

Yesterday, another million people went out on the streets to protest against the controversial law.
Clashes with the police have taken place (again!), some 30 people were arrested (again!).

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Originally posted by Clog-boy:
A little update:

When will the French government realize (the bulk of) it's people do not agree with this law...?!

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The government has backed down across the line, and talks of introducing other measures to fight youth unemployment (without attacking job security - at least not now).

bbc story

C'est fait, le CPE est mort Libération

Chirac scraps jobs law

[ 10 April 2006: Message edited by: lagatta ]

Someone was citing this strike to me the other day to support their opinion that strikes were inutile. What a great start to the day.

Edited to add: Well, it was before I read the "Moderator News" thread. So much for labour victories.

[ 10 April 2006: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

Jim Stanford has a good column in this a.m.'s Globe and Mail about how healthy the French attitude to labour politics is.

Basically, he was saying in it that French youth were fighting for the right to never ever be fired, no matter what, and for their first job to be their job for life. Of course, I realized that he's a right-wing pundit and this is to be expected, that he should actually misrepresent the views of his opponents and then shoot them down. But it was so blatant! He didn't even mention that the law was proposing to treat workers under 26 differently than other workers in that they should be allowed to be fired without cause. That's just a wee bit different than fighting for the right to never be fired and to keep your first job for life.

I'm adding here a quotation from an article by Rick Wolff over at Monthly Review (USA).

Lessons of a Left Victory in France

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First, a badly disunited left -- divided along age, gender, income, immigrant, educational, ethnic, and other lines -- found it possible as well as necessary to unite. The unifying focus was on their common relation to the security and conditions of labor.

Second, the power of this particular focus undermined the French government's repeated efforts to split the better-paid from the less-well-paid workers, the immigrant from the non-immigrant, the young from the older, and the more from the less-educated.

Third, the government's effort to invoke "the law" as expressing the "democratic will of the people" failed to dissuade a mass movement that believed it represented the people far better and far more genuinely. A kind of dual power situation emerged...

Finally and perhaps most importantly, the alliance of students and workers confronts the lesson that unified, mass, direct political action can win battles.

A lesson about the US mass media also deserves to be drawn yet again. They mostly ignored the momentous events in France. Some found good copy in wildly exaggerating the scattered violence whose minimal scope and impact actually attested to the mass demonstrations' remarkable organization, discipline, and solidarity.

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The French universities are re-opening. Student demonstrators were calmed when the government withdrew its bill giving employers the right to fire new employees without showing cause. The infamous “first contract” for young workers designed in response to last year's riots against police violence by young French citizens from recent immigrant families, created this year's mass demonstrations, and student strike action.

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Three moments of the French revolt.

1. First Moment: The Impact of the No Vote, May 2005.

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With a vote of 55 percent, the French electorate decisively rejected the proposed European Constitution in the May 29, 2005, referendum.1 This proposal aimed to write into constitutional law the policy of economic neoliberalism or no-holds-barred globalized capitalism.

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The vote was sharply divided along class lines—a reminder to the elites that the people still exist, popular classes still resist, and the world of labor can be mobilized. The No rallied the votes of 80 percent of production workers, 70 percent of small farmers, 67 percent of white-collar workers, 64 percent of civil servants, and more than 50 percent of craft workers, small shopkeepers, and intermediate professions. It got the vote of 66 percent of households with monthly incomes less than $1,800, 75 percent of those without degrees, and 71 percent of the unemployed. This result was the product of the consciousness, resistance, and unity of the popular classes. It was their first huge victory in a confrontation with neoliberalism since the big strikes of 1995.

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Lessons:

1. "First, that the vigilance of the rank and file of the trade-union and pro-working-class parties is essential to impose a democratic policy on their leadership, who are influenced by neoliberal pressures";

2. "...when the leadership of a trade union or workers’ party becomes again what it should never have stopped being, the militant leadership of a working-class organization, it can quickly regain the confidence and the support of its rank and file."

Second Moment: The Uprising in the Cités of the Suburbs, October–November 2005

Third Moment: The Mobilization Against the CPE, February–April 2006

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One understands the main objective of the CPE: to exacerbate competition between workers, to make precarious the employment of the youngest while using them to dismantle the whole wage-earner permanent job statute, and to launch the attack against the great victories of French workers embodied in the relatively progressive labor laws of France: limits imposed on the logic of capital especially in the forms of protections against arbitrary dismissals. The CPE is a device to make the French labor market “flexible” (by suppressing the minimum wage, creating a single flexible work contract, etc.) as recommended by the advocates of neoliberalism—who have been dreaming for a long time of putting an end to the “French exception.”

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Numbers in demonstrations of resistance:

"500,000 on February 7;
1,000,000 on March 7;
1,500,000 on March 18;
2–3,000,000 on March 28;
and more than 3,000,000 on April 4."

[ 21 June 2006: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]