Pay attention to what happens in France next week. There are lessons for us, too, as French unions call a nationwide “day of action” on Tuesday aimed at forcing the nation’s center-right government to nullify labor legislation that would create temporary “first employment contracts” and a substandard wage for young job-seekers.
The government claims it’s trying to put a dent in sky-high youth unemployment and avert a reprise of the riots that rocked immigrant quarters outside Paris and other main cities last fall. The Conservatives say job prospects would brighten, especially for those poorly educated first generation French citizens and recent immigrants who frequently leave school with no skills or qualifications, if labor regulations on business were loosening.
Among the loudest protesters: Youths and minority immigrants. They object to legislation that would make them in effect “at-will” employees, without the job security won by other workers, and weeks of demonstrations leading up to Tuesday’s action are threatening to close down the country in a general strike. Critics say the Contrat de première embauche (CPE) or substandard first employment contract, gives employers carte blanche to dismiss young workers under 26 years of age at any time during their first two years of employment without justification, prior notice or severance.
Unions, including the national teachers union, say the move will deepen the divide in the job market, which already resembles a dual labor force. They fear employers toying with the status of permanent jobs, instituting short-term contracts that make it painless to fire workers while easily recycling recruits into yet more short-term work. In effect, the new recruits would be disposable or “casual” workers, a trap common in the low-wage job markets of China and southern Asia and increasingly problematic in the US, particularly in states without strong workplace labor regulations. That’s a problem not yet widespread in Western Europe. In France, some 90 percent of work contracts remain long term.
A survey in the French daily Le Monde this week showed 68 per cent of respondents opposing the new work plans, and close to 50 percent polled rated the present government as “too authoritarian.” Other polls showed opposition to the law running at 80 percent among those aged 15- to 24.
The nation’s three trade union federations are demanding the government withdraw the bill, and are mulling over whether to make Tuesday’s action a one-day-general strike, something proposed by the teachers union.
2 Comments:
1 northbrooklyn
· Mar 29, 2006 at 8:30 pm
I would be very careful about making parallels between our situation here and the circumstances in France. It is impossible to be fired in France. There is very little innovation accepted in their society. Consequently, few jobs/industries are created. It’s a bit of a mess, actually.
2 Michael Hirsch
· Apr 1, 2006 at 3:45 pm
It’s no harder to fire a worker with a permanent contract in France than it is to remove a tenured teacher from the New York school system, despite DOE propaganda that the contract straitjackets innovation or Gaullist propaganda that France is noncompetitive. All it takes is due process and a justifiable reason, and a poorly performing “permanent” worker is replaced.
The “parallels”–and I wasn’t making one-to-one correlations so much as cross-cultural comparisons–are over what the two nations prize. In the US, the needs of business for a flexible workforce (read: hiring and firing at-will) predominate, in part because our unions never succeeded in organizing the entire country, including the union-free South, but were strong in at most 15-20 states. In France, a race to the bottom is harder to accomplish, precisely because you have a workforce that easily mobilizes to defend its legislative and workplace gains. Over there, they’ve won national laws requiring employers to demonstrate a worker is unsuitable before replacing him/her, and the Villepin government’s plan for a sub-standard wage for young workers would be an incentive not so much to create new jobs but to force older workers out.
The proposed legislation also would guarantee younger workers never reach the level of security held by the present workforce, or even by NYC teachers. That’s a Brave New World I don’t want to live in. Do you?
Think France is a mess now? If the Anglo/American fang-and-claw industrial relations model predominates around the world, even today’s job insecurities will seem like a beach party in comparison.