France: The Issue behind the Barricades

By Carl Bloice

Boy, those students sure have a lot of people in a
tizzy. From the slightly left of center of the political
spectrum all the way to the far right, pundits and
politicians are outdoing each others to declare that
something horrible is going on in the streets of France.
At the former end, the students are being roundly
ridiculed as lazy elitists, and on the far right, the
whole French nation is being characterized as crazy.
Some of the drivel passed on by the New York Times
illustrates the first; the second is reflected in a
headline on a rightwing website that asked why the
French would rather riot than work?

The demonstrators, wrote Washington Post columnist
Robert Samuelson, are suffering from "the illusion that
if they march long enough and burn enough cars they can
prevent unwanted change."

Post columnist Steven Pearlstein pontificated, "Rather
than supporting the reforms that might generate more
jobs and more income," the protesters "have bought into
the nostalgic of a France that once was, but can never
be again."

But it’s not all sound and fury signifying nothing,
either in the streets of Lyon or the columns of U.S.
newspapers. There is a real issue here. The U.S. (and
some of the European) media choose not to recognize it
and insists on dissing the demonstrators and the French
labor unions. But the people see it. That’s why the
French people support the protestors, as do a lot of
people elsewhere in Europe and beyond. This isn’t just a
dispute over the silly oxymoronic proposition that you
can fight unemployment by making it easier to fire
people. The students have challenged the holy grail of
contemporary runamok capitalism: "reform."

The government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin
introduced a reform of the "first employment contract"
(referred to by the French acronym CPE) to allow private
employers to fire workers under the age of 26 without
cause during the first two years they are on the job.
The essence of reform is something called "labor market
liberalization." Simply put, for the "market system" to
move forward working people are going to have to give up
some of the gains they have made over the past century
in wages, working condition and employment security,
some of which they have come to take for granted. These
changes, it is argued, are unavoidable if market
economies are to survive, and the government is the
agent to bring them about.

It is generally acknowledged throughout Western Europe
that such power of dismissal is one thing that
distinguishes the capitalist regime there and the one in
the United States. Associated Press writer Angela
Charlton got it right when she observed that "In much of
Europe, the idea that a company can dismiss workers just
because profits are sagging is unacceptable, an affront
to modern values." She correctly notes that: "In the
United States and Britain, young people frequently jump
from job to job. To dismiss an employee, companies can
often just say, ’You’re fired’."

"Yet," wrote Charlton, "economists say that even if the
American model, where layoffs are common, would never
fly here, reforms to Europe’s labor laws are crucial to
the continent’s economic health." She doesn’t indicate
which "economists" she’s been talking to, but rest
assured there are economists in France who wouldn’t
agree. There are lots of economists who also wouldn’t
agree that "The battle in France over a new labor law is
just the loudest and latest sign that the European
system is ailing." In fact, they would probably say just
the opposite is true; that the struggle in the
parliament and the streets is a sign that the situation
is healthy because the people who would be adversely
affected are resisting this relentless drive to produce
ever more economic inequality.

The question of how to "cure" the "ailing" European
system, Charlton writes with breathtaking pomposity, "is
prompting soul-searching and underscoring divisions
across the continent. At stake is Europe’s vision of
itself: Is it the world’s epicenter of enlightened
ideas, or an economic heavyweight? Can it be both?" Does
she mean an enlightened idea like the idea that the
richest economies in the world ought to be able to
provide some measure of employment security and
protection against arbitrary dismissal for young people,
whose knowledge and skills are indispensable? An
enlightened idea that young people entering the
workforce should not be treated, in the view of the
students, like facial tissue?

No one should be fooled that the French business class
and the conservative government are concerned here for
the fate of the unemployed youth in immigrant
communities, whose marginalization produced violent
street convulsions last year. It’s just a ploy, on par
with the demagogic assertions from the political right
that the current campaign in our country against
undocumented workers is motivated by concern for
unemployed African American youth. The French government
is pushing the new labor law because the bosses want it.
They see a chance to reap greater profits from their
greater freedom to dismiss and to discipline workers. If
they thought they could get away with it they would be
pressing for the same sacking power over all workers,
regardless of age. The French establishment targeted
young worker with this "reform" because they thought
they could get away with it. If they had their druthers
the eradication of job protections would extend to
everybody who works for a wage.

Workplace "reform" is even further advanced in
Australia, where a new law called "Work Choices"
decimates collective bargaining, replacing it with a new
system of individual contracts. The measure allows
trading off vacation time for higher pay and exempts
companies with less than 100 employees from any unfair
dismissal laws. One union leader has called the new
labor law "the most vicious and draconian" legislation
the country has even seen.

Taking measure of the U.S. media’s response to the
French protests, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
recently noted that, "while reporters and pundits are
sure it’s a simple matter of economics, not everyone is
convinced." The media watchdog went on to quote
economist Mark Weisbrot who wrote recently that "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,"
continued Weisbrot, "The U.S. economy is supposedly more
dynamic, but French productivity is actually higher than
ours. Their public pensions, free tuition at
universities, longer vacations (4-5 weeks as compared
with 2 weeks here), state-sponsored daycare, and other
benefits are said to be unaffordable in a ’global
economy.’ But since these were affordable in years past,
there is no economic logic that would make them less so
today, with productivity having grown—no matter what
happens in India or China."

Actually, there is no reason to think that in today’s
world higher productivity and greater ability to compete
on the world market will automatically result in
improvements in the lives of working people. What it can
be counted upon to do is to increase profits and
exacerbate the steadily growing economic inequality in
contemporary capitalism. The rich are getting richer at
a much faster rate than any improvement in the lives of
working people.

"By any reasonable standard, the last few years have
been bad ones for most people’s paychecks," wrote David
Leonhardt in the New York Times (April 5). "The average
hourly wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that
makes up 80 percent of the work force — is slightly
lower than it was four years ago, once inflation is
taken into account. That’s right: Most Americans have
taken a pay cut since 2002." So much for U.S.-style
employment reforms.

As the protests in France wore on and it became evident
that the new labor law was probably dead in the water,
the line of its supporters began to change. Like
Democrats arguing that the war in Iraq was justified but
bungled, they began pouring criticism on the head of
poor Prime Minster Dominique de Villepin, accusing him
of screwing up a chance to do something good. "The slow-
motion collapse of the French government’s attempt to
free up youth employment law is a serious setback to
labour market liberalization in Europe," declared the
editors of the Financial Times (April 5). "But if this
marks the start of a proper debate about the need for
reform in France it will still be possible to salvage
something valuable from this debacle.

"What has failed so spectacularly over the past few
weeks is not liberalization itself but a political
methodology of reform. Dominique de Villepin, the French
prime minister, rammed reform through parliament as if
he were leading a charge of the Imperial Guard. Jacques
Chirac, the president, maintained an Olympian detachment
from controversy far too long, so by the time he
intervened it was already too late.

"The lesson French reformers should take away from this
is not that labour market reform is political suicide,
but that it cannot be conducted in such an arrogant
manner."

AP’s Charlton chimed in, "Protesters over the jobs law
are as upset by how Chirac and his government have
handled the crisis as by the legislation that sparked
it. As they have done with unpopular reforms over the
past two decades, French leaders pushed this one through
without explaining it first to the people it would
affect."

Much of the media attack on the French workers and
students has centered on the question of whether there
should be strikes and street demonstrations at all. Most
of the outraged commentators are big hypocrites on this
question. Such political protests are bad when they
involve students and workers in Paris or immigrant
rights campaigners in Los Angeles, but are to be
celebrated when they are against governments they don’t
approve of or involve any of their favorite color-coded
"revolutions." This also reflects a skewed view of
democracy. If the polls are to be believed, most French
people support the stance of the demonstrators, and the
government that rammed through the "reform" is on the
way out in the next election.

If it comes to pass that the awful employment "reform"
is ditched, it will be a victory not only for its
opponents in France but for working people everywhere.
The workers and students have once again demonstrated
the vitality of the ideas upon which the French republic
was born: justice, equality and solidarity. We can all
be glad they stood on the front lines of the resistance
to neo-liberal globalization.

Times’ correspondent Elaine Sciolino wrote that "The
contrasts are apparent on the campus here. Banners
predict nothing less than the fall of France’s center-
right government and the inevitable triumph of
collective progress over individualism." She went on
rather dismissively to report: "But there is also guitar
playing, soccer ball kicking and sun tanning to be
done." On the day that three million people took to the
streets across France, I was talking to a young
Frenchman (by way of Central Africa) who said he had
received a call that day from a friend in Paris who
reported he had demonstrated all day, went home, took a
long bath and went out for a good meal. "We French as
very political," my acquaintance said. "But we like to
live too."

Get it?

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Carl Bloice is a journalist based in San Francisco.