Why is this in the Observer? If it were in the Telegraph or FT I could almost have forgiven it. But when did the Observer turn into yet another cheerleader for the locusts?

So nice deconstruction Jérôme and let's keep 'em coming!

Advance and Retreat

A show of spring fury against France's government is really about fear of change

"Ah, to breathe the fine air of France!" as he spoke in mock-heroic tones last week, Sayed Diakite, 19, a student from the southern suburbs of Paris, was smiling gleefully, and weeping at the same time.

Like hundreds of other young people boxed in by riot police between the Bon Marché department store and the Hotel Lutetia in the heart of the Left Bank, his eyes were running in reaction to pungent tear gas and smoke from a burning newspaper kiosk. Amid the uproar, Diakite and his fellow students felt a budding sense of empowerment. Up to half a million young people had gone, some riotously, to the streets throughout France on Thursday. Then, joined by union members and sympathizers, as many as 1.5 million joined marches on Saturday, some of which ended in violent clashes with riot police. Would this show of force bring a government that seems ever more out of touch to its knees?

Again the intro about the irrelevant violent bits. (Note that on French TV, the riots were covered, but AFTER all the reports on the demonstrations and the negotiations. They were shown, because they do take place, but it's not what this is all about. I think this is the right way to talk about it)

(...)

France is in another bout of revolt against its government, conducted with the kind of theatrical brio that seems more the antithesis of dialogue than its prelude. Union leaders are threatening a general strike later this week. Many of France's universities have been in an uproar for a month. The Sorbonne, the iconic epicenter of the idealistic May 1968 student uprising that nearly brought down an earlier government, has been closed for the past two weeks. At issue this time, though, are not the heady concerns of '68: the Vietnam War, or the ideas of socialism and free love.

"Theatrical brio". That sounds a lot like "élan". All these clichés seem to have been nicely absorbed by all journalists.

The 2006 rallying point is a new law, backed by Villepin, to reduce France's chronic and debilitating youth unemployment, which has rarely fallen below 20% since 1983 and currently stands at 22% -- and at more than 40% in the poorer neighbor-hoods that exploded in bitter rioting last fall. His plan: a "first employment contract" that allows employers to fire workers under the age of 26 within two years of their hiring, without cause and with no obligation to shell out France's hefty severance payments. Making it easier to get rid of unsatisfactory workers, the government believes, will help employers overcome their reluctance to hire young people in the first place. The law's critics say it will promote tenuous jobs and make it even harder for young people to find steady employment.

The usual mistakes as everywhere with some variations:

• the unemployment rate is not misused, but neither is it explained, and will be understood by all as "20% of youth are unemployed"
  
• a new one: "France's hefty severance payments". Where does that come from? Any numbers? How are they heftier than anywhere else? I thought the problems was that you could not fire people?
  
• getting rid of "unsatisfactory" workers - that's actually a smartly ambiguous way to describe things. It's true, in the sense that this is presumably what the law is meant to allow, but it suggests that the laws will finally allow to get rid of incompetent workers (and that indeed comes further down the article)

The law has hit a raw nerve in a society deeply attached to the idea that a job is forever. A poll last week found that more than two-thirds of the population -- and more than 80% of the young people the law aims to help -- want the government to rescind the law's terms. For some, opposition justified violence. At the Sorbonne, a minority of protesters hurled anything they could tear loose -- umbrella stanchions, metal barricades, café chairs -- at the shields of riot police, who replied with water cannon and tear gas. "The bourgeoisie to the gulag!" read a wall scrawl.

Most of last week's demonstrators deplored the violence -- but not the passion that underlaid it. Marchers derided throwaway "Kleenex jobs" for the young as the first chink in the armor protecting France's tradition of jobs-for-life. "This law is a sign of social regression," said Gilles Debin, a white-collar union official who joined the Saturday protest in Paris. "It leaves the workers with no recourse, and we'll oppose it and anything like it until it's withdrawn." Even many with sinecures in the public sector saw the law as the start of an invasive ultra-liberalism that would one day threaten their livelihoods.

"deeply attached to the idea that a job is forever". Where is THAT meme coming from? That's never been the case or, if it has, it hasn't been for at least 30 years. This is just one of these casual slanders that pile up and up and up...

"Marchers derided throwaway "Kleenex jobs" for the young as the first chink in the armor protecting France's". The FIRST CHINK? How dare they write that kind of crap? For the past 20 years the political discourse about the code du travail has been a one way street about the need for more flexibility, less taxes on wages, less protection... The reality has been somewhat different under left wing and right wing governments, but the overall direction has been clear: to give companies cheaper and more compliant labor.

The young -- those most in need of a leg up -- heaped scorn on a law intended to help them. Serbian-born Zeljko Stojanovic, 19, joined the march with fellow high school students of foreign origin from the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. "They want to close off immigration and doom young people to the lousy jobs nobody else will take," said Stojanovic, who wants to be an auto mechanic. "We're the ones who'll suffer if the bosses can just fire people without cause." Privileged university students saw matters no differently. Said Florian Louis, 22, a history student at the prestigious L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales: "Maybe you can talk about labor flexibility in England or America, where there are lots of jobs. But not here. France wants no part in a race to the bottom." Neither young man seemed to understand how labor flexibility created those jobs in Britain or the U.S., underscoring the failure of the government to make a persuasive case for its policies.

Again an argument not based on facts.

The student rebels of 2006 had little of the revolutionary optimism or willingness to escape conformity for a precarious existence that infused their brash predecessors at the Sorbonne in '68. "Today's demonstrators are in a very real manner reactionaries," says Dominique Moïsi, deputy director of the French Institute on International Relations, "rejecting any prospect of more risk." Fear of losing jobs in a country that is poor at creating new ones may be the cause of the moment.

It is not poor at creating new ones, dammit! Stop repeating lies mindlessly. Go get the facts. You have a column in the FT, you owe it to your readers.

But French ambivalence about a changing world is nothing new. In the 1950s, French novelist Pierre Daninos suggested it was part of the national psyche to battle gallantly -- if often fruitlessly -- against invasion, as national treasures such as Joan of Arc once did. By that measure, the French in the streets last week were fighting to hold back the inexorable challenge of international competition. "It's pure negativism, and that's typical of today's France," says Ezra Suleiman, professor of European studies at Princeton. "No one is suggesting what should be done instead to increase employment. It seems like the only solidarity France can find these days is solidarity in negative action."

"gallantly and fruitlessly"; "the inexorable challenge of international competition". The same meme again - that of a country lost in an earlier century and doomed.

As to the "only solidarity". Stop talking about thing you know little about.

(...)

But dumping an unpopular policy would leave the larger problem unanswered: How to modernize France? Jobs will not spring magically into being if the hated employment law is abandoned. Eventually, structural reforms will be needed to transform France's prospects -- and that will need fresher, more politically astute leadership than the country has now.

Howto modernize France? How to create jobs? Look around, it's happening!

André Glucksmann, one of the new philosophers who emerged in 1968, thinks that the great majority of French voters -- the ones who didn't march last weekend -- know that things have to change. "Every generation we have a war, a revolt or a revolution," he says. "That's how we recycle our élite." Rising to the top of preliminary polls for the presidency are politicians who propose new ways of doing business: Sarkozy, who talks of a "rupture from the policies of the last 30 years," and Socialist Ségolène Royal, who has scandalized her party leadership by praising Tony Blair's pragmatic market policies. They'll hear none of that at the Sorbonne these days. But for all the fury last week, even France can't resist the winds of change forever.

Royal said that Blair was to be praised for actually spending more money on education and healthcare. How on earth did that ever got transformed into "praising his pragmatic market policies"? Because nothing Blair does can ever be described as "socialist"? The implicit tone here, as always, is that she praised the "market" bit, not the "pragmatic" (i.e. lefty) bit of the policies.

Wankers.

As to "France can't resist the winds of change forever", we'll see. Not if I have my say!

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

First, every single article I see in the English-language media agrees that France has a serious problem with underutilization of her youth. OECD reports, FT articles, Economist editorials, Guardian writeups--all start with the understanding that the French unemployment rate, particularly among minority youth, is out of line with the rest of Europe.

I see your extracts from charts and tables "proving" that this is not the case, but they don't move me. It's way too easy to fall into the "lying with statistics" swamp by extracting numbers one at a time and analyzing them point by point. There must be some source that examines an issue like employment, deeply and thoroughly and with minimal bias, and arrives at a summary that can be used as a starting point. In the technical areas I'm familiar with there are a thousand different ways that you can read the numbers, but in the end a non-expert simply must trust the judgement of one who has spent a lifetime studying the topic. I would simply like to see you quote some experts on French employment who agree with your argument.

Now I can understand that there is undoubtably bias (partly because they're in English and partly because mainstream economic writing tends be capitalistic) in my news sources, but when you start saying things like "the supposedly leftwing Guardian" then your argument starts to appear somewhat Quixotic. The Guardian IS a leftwing newspaper, and when one accuses it of not being left wing enough, one is positioning oneself on the extreme left--or out in left field. Obviously the Economist is going to have an unacceptable editorial slant, but your claim that there is NOT an "international consensus" on this issue is not supported by any more citations than the Guardian's statement that there is. If there's not an international consensus on the French unemployment situation, then where are the citations of MSM articles to support the claim?

From what I can see on this side of the pond, the current student demonstrations, coming on the heels of recent riots by underprivileged NON-students, appear to be more like this: French university students, realizing that there is a system set up over many years to protect their professional jobs when they get out, are concerned that this system is under risk of being dismantled. They want things to be like they were for their parents: Get a university education and then be safe for life.

This does not appear to be a shining moment for the socialist movement. There is a broad concensus that there is a problem, with minority demonstrations and economists' statistics to support that belief. The problem is largely on the backs of poor youth, who should be the core of the socialist movement. Instead, it appears that the "socialist" elite youth are pushing hard to maintain a system that protects them while doing nothing for the poor.

I'm not trying to be an obnoxious American here; this is an internal French issue and not something that either America or the UN or anybody else is going to be able to do anything about. But it sure does appear that these protests are all based on a desire to continue a system where an educated elite makes all sorts of noises about how they are on the left, singing La Marseillaise and supporting the students on the barricades, while uncounted unemployed minority youths continue to be stuck without options.

also, are there any french employers on the site? what does that group think?

I have no difficulty at all believing that the english-language press repeats facts with no basis by simply reading each other's articles. (I've long wondered how many of the very few American correspondents based in France do anything more than simply rewrite what they read in LE Monde and Fig, but thats another story).

But all that said, I am having difficulty understanding the distinction between a "youth unemployment rate" of 22% and "8% of youth are unemployed"? I have a phd but not in economics, so I'm not sure if these are terms of art that I'm not understanding or if its a matter of who is counted.

That said, in response to asdf, I don't see anything wrong with students protesting against a government that has done nothing but muck things up for 4 years, and if their understanding of the policy is that it will hurt them, isn't that enough of a reason to consider the policy a failure? Isn't it an essential requirement of social policy that it convince people that the policy itself is not only economically sound (highly doubtful in this case) buit also democratic in conception and execution. Isn't that the reason that the GOP failed to move its social security privatization scheme even though it had near universal support in the mainstream press here?

It's more painful to find the same bunk paraded in The Observer under the byline of Will Hutton. Jérôme, you've had a good go at his opinion piece, and I'm not going to duplicate your work. But I just got down a book of Will Hutton's that I read three or four years ago: The World We Are In, 2002. Opening at random, here are some snippets of what I find:

Britain has an American-style deregulated labour market, weak trade unions, indifferent social protection, and a fierce market for corporate control to keep the management of quoted companies, as the conservatives would argue, on their toes. It has, as a survey in Management Today reported in July 2001, rewarded its chief executives more handsomely than other European countries (...) Meanwhile, ordinary workers' pay was the lowest of the same countries. With these advantages, if the conservatives are right the British economy should be clipping along. Instead, its performance is only modest.

For the zealots -- rather like ancient druids or the cargo cult islanders -- this is proof only that something is wrong with their rituals and they must redouble their efforts; not that their whole belief system may be awry. Others do not acknowledge the reality at all. The Sunday Times Business Section's economic columnist and conservative zealot Irwin Stelzer is a classic of the breed, who rehearses his prejudices as the truth, selectively choosing his facts while omitting others, week after week (...) In Stelzerland a "sclerotic" Europe has lagging productivity generated by a "eurocracy" that delights in setting burdensome regulations that "drive entrepreneurs mad". (...) The notion that putput per man-hour might be higher in the former West Germany and France than the uS is plainly preposterous, as is the idea that, apart from one or two exceptions, the European corporate sector is anything but deadbeat. Yet Stelzer's partisan effusions go unchallenged in a way impossible for anybody who takes the alternative view. Offered a platform in an American-owned newspaper (in addition he writes for the Sun) to propagandise the Washington consensus and the new conservatism with no health warning, he is part of the internationally accepted common sense.

And it goes on like that, I could happily quote pages.

So I don't get it. Mr Hutton, how is it that you have gone from this kind of clear-eyed fighting talk to this morning's Observer column? Don't you know propaganda when you see it any more? How is it that you have become a shill for a failed Blairite vision of Europe?

First they are saying the microeconomic affects of a macroeconomic change is determined.  Oh yeah?  Since when?  Produce proof or retract.

Second, there is the hidden assumption the French population under the age of 26 has a known higher percentage of employment incompetence than those above the age of 26, therefore, on one's 26th birthday one magically acquires a greater degree of employment competency?   Blink  Produce proof or retract.

Third, let's examine the fundamental argument:

Taking p to be "easing restrictions on firing for incompentence" and q to be "increase employment" the Formal structure of the argument is either:

Case I.  p->q  as a Material Implication (If/Then)

Case II.  p <-> q as the Equivalence Implication (If and Only If)

Case I has no material entailment as the structure of the argument can be reformulated as:

~p OR q and substituting we get:

"easing restrictions on firing for incompentence" OR "increase employment" - meaning France may see an increase in employment without easing restrictions as is verified by the Labor History of France as in  Jerome's deconstruction, above:

unemployment only went down in the period when labor laws were toughened under the Socialist government led by Jospin.

Therefore Case I is both Invalid and False.  QED.

Examination of Case II exhibits the same Logical and Factual errors examined in Case I, and so will not be explicated, but also violates the basic argument itself:  should firing of under-26 year olds due to greater employment incompetence raise the employment rate France and since French employers:

...can already fire someone for being incompetent.

Then by the Guardian/Observer's argument in Case II there is no problem with the French unemployment rate and, thus, no change is needed.  QED

So not only is the Guardian/Observer's argument Invalid and False it doesn't even hold itself.  

Simply put: the Guardian/Observer is spewing nonsense.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

After reading a number of comments here and, in particular, Jerome's words that the socialists should be more optimistic, it dawned on me how right Jerome was.

It is absolutely essential that progressive thought and actions contain an element of utopian desires.  By "utopian," I do not mean dreamy, wishful thinking, but rather cogent and intelligent views that illuminate present injustices through the light of a different and better future.  The right-wing in the U.S., and to a lesser degree in Europe, has sucessfully imposed regimes of economic and political thought that drain power from populations by endowing neo-liberal ecnomics with an inexorable "feel."  "Feel" is important, it is that subliminal framework that allows for articles like the one Jerome is deconstructing to appear logical and normal to most who read it.  It is the feeling of our current culture that allows us to seemingly explain things because they seem so normal and so logical, even if they do not hold up to scrutiny.

We are witnessing a cultural tragedy unfold. The French carry a Utopian ideal in their collective heads about what it means to be French. They are self-appointed defenders of Europe's real republican virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their rightful place is as Europe's leaders, and the state, embodying an idea of France, is the nation's master puppeteer.

None of this works in 2006. The state, as all others in Europe, is circumscribed by global market forces. France is only one of 25 EU member states and the way liberty, equality and fraternity have been delivered since the 1950s has to be recast.

The fact is that France has been leading the globalization bandwagon in many arenas; it's just that the French public is more wary of its upper classes.  Perhaps the French bourgeoisie should be more wary of their proletariate, still running around with some idealism.

If yesterdays demonstrations happened, workers all over the world should thank the French, not be wary of them.  they are putting into action new vocabularies about morality, politics and economics.  Chirac should listen; so should the world.

They has an editorial which was more or less neutral, but more sympathetic towards the protests: Leader

Today, Stuard Jeffries writes in support: Why are the French so ready to take to the streets? Maybe because, unlike the British, they have something worth fighting for

On an urelated note, and to show that The Guardian/Observer is not exactly doctrinaire left-wing, this appaling hack-job on Vanessa Redgrave led me to fire a pissed-off letter to the editor: She's got issues (what got me was certainly not the criticism of Redgrave's politics but things like this: 'But,' I continue, 'you have to realise that there are selfish people like me who just don't care about the rest of the world.' She is genuinely shocked: 'You're not one of them! Are you one of them? I don't think so.' 'Yes I am,' I insist. 'I don't care what's happening in Kosovo, I really don't. I care a lot about what happens to my family and friends, so I'm not entirely selfish. ... the whole piece ridicules any kind of political consciousnes, rather depressing to see this in The Guardian.)