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More people turned out on April 4 than on March 28, to the surprise of observers (including this writer) who feared that the unions couldn’t get their members to give up another day’s pay. There were certainly far more than the 86,000 marchers that the police claimed to “count” in Paris. Perhaps three million demonstrated, in 268 cities across France; certainly, in this nation of 65 million there were far more than a million. High school and university students marched first, followed by unions and political groups. Once again, the mood was marvelous; the marchers were very well organized and the police discreet, hovering in the side streets, leaving it to the contingents to monitor themselves and keep the unruly out. Two blocks away from the march, calm reigned. When the marches broke up, the “breakers” came out to scuffle with the police and provide the pictures that must have appeared on the evening news in the United States. The number of arrests appeared to be about the same as on March 28th, around 800 nationwide. There was nothing to match the violence of March 23. On that date, bands of right-wing thugs and apolitical predators attacked police and demonstrators on the other side of Paris. Police used tear gas to disperse and arrest them. The “breakers” have become a fact of life, but the police and the marchers have negotiated ground rules in advance of large demonstrations, and the preparations have paid off.
Why were they marching? They demanded that the government withdraw a new form of labor contract, the “first job contract” (CPE). The contract’s author, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, claims the CPE will make it easier for men and women under age 26 to get a first job. Most French people want the “young” to have jobs, but 63% oppose the CPE. The conflict involves real issues: How hard it is to get a first job, whether the CPE would help at all, what its effect would be on other workers, and the speed with which the law was rushed onto the statute books.
Most French people don’t get their first job until their mid or late 20s. Around 20% of the under-26s are unemployed. That figure is misleading. It represents 20% of those actually in the job market, not 20% of all the under-26s. The unemployed are 8.1% of their age cohort (from 15 to 24) in official statistics, according to Jean-Francois Couvrat in Le Monde. Most aren’t in the job market at all, because they are pursuing the approved strategy, which is to go to a university or technical college, get credentials, stay out of trouble, and then try to get located in the job market in one’s mid-20s. Those who have done it right still don’t have it easy. Employers can pick and choose at will. And they choose the people who don’t live in the working-class suburbs, people who don’t have names like Abdul or Fatima. The fact that young graduates from the heavily “immigrant” working-class suburbs often don’t find jobs breeds resentment. That resentment contributed to the real riots that took place in November 2005, and it undercuts the whole strategy of getting kids to “wait their turn” in school. Many believe that whatever they do, they won’t be allowed to get ahead, because of their ethnicity or where they live.
Unemployment is higher for them, and it’s unacceptably high for French young people as a whole. Some 20%-30% of each year’s new entrants into the job market won’t have “real jobs” two years later. The labor market is bitterly competitive. At bottom, it is the persistent national unemployment, 9%-10% of the labor force for nearly 30 years, that makes it an employers’ market. Employers don’t want the young in general. They don’t need to spend the effort to break in the really unskilled young, the ones that left school early. They can get many qualified young people to take jobs that don’t match their degrees, and often they can get subsidies from the government to accompany them.
What the CPE would add to the power of employers is additional “flexibility”; that is, the right, within some limits, to fire the young without giving any reason. Nobody can guarantee that the CPE would lead to fairer hiring. In the aftermath of November’s riots, some very interesting ideas circulated. One was to have job applicants present “blank” dossiers, describing their education and skills but not giving their names and addresses. Another was to create more jobs for the unskilled in construction, using them to tear down the worst of the 1960s high-rise projects in the working-class suburbs. These ideas have gone nowhere; instead, we have the CPE. The CPE is not the first of its kind. Last year, Villepin’s predecessor as prime minister, presiding over a cabinet containing many of the same ministers, promulgated another special labor contract, the CNE. Instead of targeting a segment of the labor force, the CNE targeted a segment of the employers--“small employers” who have fewer than 20 employees. The government claims it’s a success. Employers have signed some 200,000 people on the CNE. But the national statistics agency notes that most of these people would have been hired in any event. It estimated that only ten thousand to twenty-five thousand net new jobs could be attributed to the CNE. French employers just are not going to increase their hiring—or, rather, they’re not going to change their hiring AND firing. The French economy is very dynamic. It creates some 30,000 new jobs a month—and destroys just as many. The employers already have the flexibility the CPE is supposed to give them. They can hire workers on short-term contracts or part time, and they can fire for economic reasons and “personal reasons” as well as for misconduct. Workers have the right to fight being fired, through shop stewards and ultimately through special labor courts. But often they don’t choose to exercise those rights, given how tight the labor market is.
This, the CPE doesn’t really change much. The employers’ federation (MEDEF) supported it weakly, after the fact. It won’t commit its members to hire more young people. Its real goal is to change the labor code as a whole—to reduce the protections that all workers have in their existing jobs. Villepin’s rival on the right, Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, repeats the mantra the MEDEF really wants to hear: a “flexible” single contract. The MEDEF had very little to gain from nibbling at the edges of the labor code the way that Villepin and Raffarin have done. Their rivals in the streets both know that preserving labor law is really the underlying issue. That’s why unions have joined students in common demonstrations.
Villepin’s political arrogance and clumsiness, in turn, gave students and unions a broader issue to protest: his refusal to negotiate. It’s widely agreed in France that legislation should occur only after ALL interest groups have been consulted (not just business). For example, Interior Minister Sarkozy and President Jacques Chirac encouraged Muslim leaders to form a national council that has talked with the government on issues such as the riots and the legislation governing the wearing of religious signs (including the veil) in public schools. In 2004, Raffarin’s cabinet (in which Villepin was foreign minister) passed a law promising that it would submit all changes in the labor code to the “social partners” to negotiate over. But Villepin didn’t keep the promise. Instead, he rushed his law through the National Assembly, ignoring the rumbling from the street and from his own supporters. Villepin compounded his error by proclaiming that he would hang tough, no matter what.
His own cabinet’s members, headed by Sarkozy, undercut him because of his high-handedness. Before the March 28 demonstrations, Sarkozy said openly that the CPE should be “suspended” and reopened for discussion. After more than a million people turned out, Chirac appeared on television to “unite the nation.” Although he signed the CPE into law, he said that the National Assembly should re-examine it, shortening the duration of one’s first contract from the original two years to one and requiring the employer to give a reason for firing a worker. If enacted, these changes would gut the law, effectively withdrawing it without withdrawing it—IF everybody would accept such a massive collective fiction. Nobody did. Villepin still was adamant. And Sarkozy, adroitly, grabbed hold of Chirac’s invitation. He, not Villepin, controls the conservative party (UMP) that has a majority in the National Assembly. The president of the UMP group in the Assembly, Bernard Accoyer, is a member of Sarkozy’s faction. Accoyer “invited” the unions of students and workers to meet with him without first agreeing to accept some version of the CPE, pushing Villepin to the side. It was too little, too late. The demonstrators don’t trust Sarkozy any more than Villepin or Chirac. They turned out en masse on April 4. They see a chance to attack the underlying reality. Handwritten signs made puns on the initials CPE: “Cherche Pigeon à Exploiter” (Sucker, take this job), “Contrat Poubelle Embauché” (Hire someone to go into the trash can). Dead-end jobs and disposable people.
Some sort of negotiations will take place. What can the negotiations do? The UMP and the MEDEF want to restrict the discussion to this one law. Don’t stop there, many signs read: get rid of the CNE, too. The Socialist Party has regained some momentum by picking up that popular slogan. But the insecurity for job seekers and established workers won’t go away if these new kinds of contracts disappear. Something must be done to reduce the unemployment rate. “Flexibility” is not the answer; France has had 30 years of it. Casual labor is also a fact of life for Americans. Most have fewer protections than the CPE offered. After all, the CPE paid at least the minimum wage (eight euros an hour, which translates into $9.20) with some severance pay and access to national health insurance. Many workers in the United States might, in fact, find such a contract attractive. For France, though, the alternative policy-- increasing deficits to drive growth up--is out of the question. The European Union simply won’t allow it. There must be a massive program to rebuild the aging public housing and provide more unskilled jobs, but France can’t increase its budget deficit without violating the guidelines for the euro. Some talk of a compromise, Scandinavian style: more “flexibility” in firings, more guidance for those looking for work, and better unemployment benefits. Accept that radical uncertainty is built into capitalist economies and manage it better. If the negotiations got that far, they’d be remarkable—and they still might leave the demonstrators feeling betrayed.
France: A Month After…
May 4 2006: The French who struck on March 28 and April 4 won a great victory, one that settled nothing.
True, the French cabinet did withdraw the “first job contract” (CPE). It took them an awfully long time to bury that minor piece of legislation. At most the CPE was an attack on the edges of French labor law, so cancelling it doesn’t make any one’s job more secure. It restores a status quo in which one can still be fired for “personal reasons” or for “economic reasons” even though a company is making profits. Back to square one.
The strikes didn’t shift the balance of French politics. The government turned a deaf ear to all other complaints about job insecurity and life in the working-class suburbs. Take, for example, the recently announced “charter for student internships in companies.” All this “charter” provided was more educational supervision of these internships and the promise that a standard contract form will be drawn up. One interesting group had demanded that interns be paid half of the minimum wage and be covered by labor law. No way. Instead, the “charter” contains a “bonus” for internships that last longer than three months. Unions will be involved in negotiating the amount of the bonus on an industry-by-industry basis, but they were kept outside of the discussions of the “charter” itself. Employers’ groups, of course, were consulted (so much for “social partnership”). Employers will get additional subsidies, and the internships will remain an annoying part of the slow march that the “young” must go on to get from school to a real job.
As this example shows, despite the strikes and its low ratings in the polls, the government has kept the initiative. It has an overwhelming parliamentary majority. There are two other reasons for its dominance. One is the weakness of the labor market. The other is the difficulty of coming up with a coherent and appealing economic strategy.
As long as the labor market remains weak, there is no compulsion to offer better terms and more security to interns and job seekers. Employers don’t plan to hire any more workers in 2006 than in 2005. The bulk of the jobs that are available are in casual and low-paid services: "White-collar workers and low-level managers in hotel and restaurant businesses; maintenance workers; activity-leaders in leisure, sport, and cultural activities; cashiers and other pink-collar workers in supermarkets and self-service stores; cooks; commercial representatives; and people to respond to on-line orders and complaints.” (Le Monde, April 14) The “young,” educated or not, don’t want these jobs but are reluctantly herded toward them because there’s little else to do.
It’s this basic weakness of the demand for labor that has led French governments over the past thirty years, and especially socialist ones, to develop a strategy of sharing out the available jobs. I don’t see any enthusiasm for going any farther with the basic mechanisms of job sharing, such as early retirement and the thirty five-hour week. Mass retirement at fifty? A legal thirty-hour week? The employers and the right now want to push job sharing in the opposite direction toward making those in “real” jobs share. They want them to give up labor protections, share the fate of the young in the casual labor market, become a commodity to be hired and fired at will. That’s what presidential candidate (and sometime interior minister) Nicholas Sarkozy means by a “rupture with the French model.” As I’ve said in my previous posts for Dissent, I don’t see any prospect that universal “flexibility” would create more jobs; all it would do is “level down” all those who aren’t company presidents or accountants or lawyers or doctors. Instead of early retirement at age fifty five or sixty, there would be more unemployment and casual labor at age forty.
The more socially-minded conservatives have desperately sought to get more jobs by subsidizing personal services. How else to get jobs? In December 2005, there was a revealing two-day flurry, a “run it up the flagpole” moment. The minister of finance proposed to create a new form of consumer loan, a home equity loan that would push people to go into debt to stimulate the economy. The idea was borrowed from the US, as are all the ideas of the French right. The Bank of France immediately squelched the idea—what’s the good of luring people into more debt. The Bank’s response was revealing. France has what I call an “efficient mode of consumption.” There’s no great clamor for more “stuff,” for “starter mansions” and the like, and wrecking the society and the planet to get a little more growth goes against the grain. People have a modest level of comfort, obtained with a modest level of actual employment and energy use, and supported by universal health insurance and other social services. Essentially, France could get more jobs by being LESS efficient. It could let insurance companies and the “private sector” take over public services and make them more expensive. By putting up more layers between people and the services they use and by privatizing, it could make work for the professional middle classes and for a horde of clerks. I estimate that a quarter of the commercials I now see on television are for “new” telephone directory services, newly opened to “competition.” “Competition” at work, for no gain to the consumer. But it looks like growth to the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Is there an alternative way to stop wasting the abilities of those who want to work? We could invest in research, to try to come up with new “leading industries” that could drive a new stage of capitalism? The conservatives created a “center for industrial innovation” and held a competition for proposals. The first grants it gave were unexciting and even counter-productive (a new generation of trams that wouldn’t have drivers—strange in a world of 10 percent unemployment). The “center” will probably support Peugeot’s development of a hybrid diesel car. Biofuels and medical research are other areas the center has funded. But they’re not dramatic, not a new social project, unless they are presented as part of rebuilding France to have an even more efficient mode of consumption in an ecologically daunting future. An obvious set of needs not being addressed is rebuilding the working-class suburbs built in the 1960s, but where is the money to come from? The Socialists will have to face these problems as they try to come up with an economic strategy for the 2007 elections.
