by Jerome a Paris
Thu Mar 23rd, 2006 at 09:27:17 AM EST
Who's right in France?
PARIS What is happening in the streets of French cities is in one sense deeply absurd. The object of the protests is withdrawal by the government of a modest law intended to improve employment chances for poorly qualified young people.
Although it avoids the stupid clichés about "Spring in Paris, time for student to go on the streets with élan and revolutionary fervor" (which are in each of the pieces I critique, really), this article starts with the same deprecatory content about the protests that I have seen in EVERY SINGLE article in the US on this topic. It's always stated that the law is "modest", that it will improve thigns for workers, and that the protesters are wrong.
This is never substantiated (it's false, of course), but that sets the tone for the rest of the article.
The measure is being attacked by its opponents as reinforcing the precariousness of the lives of those same young people. This is a dramatization in the great tradition of French political psychodrama. What is most interesting, however, has been the revelation of the economic and social anxiety of the French middle classes.
The very real criticism that this IS reinforcing precariousness is dismissed, again, without any argument.
I say the middle classes because the marchers were not the poor. Other than the public service unions, those leading the marches were politically active high school and university students, a striking number of them accompanied by parents or whole families.
This has also been a theme of the other articles: it's supposedly the "privileged" who are demonstrating - against a measure deemed to help the poorest.
- since when is being middle class a "privilege"?
- the working class youth are demonstrating alongside the "privileged" and are as adamantly opposed to that law - because they know they will be its first victims.
But then Pfaff suddenly, and unexpectedly, changes his tone:
The events of the past week in France have been a reaction to the threat of social descent and economic precariousness.
Saturday was for the French middle classes the counterpart of the car-burning late last year by the young of the poor immigrant suburbs. Both sent messages. The message of the suburbs - immigrant assimilation - was understood, although whether the public response will be adequate remains to be seen.
(...)
The usual foreign description of the French problem is that the nation and its political and economic elites are failing to confront the demands of the globalized economy, taking refuge in the unrealistic notion of defending a French "social model" that has no place in the modern world. Hence any effort to make the employment market more flexible is rejected, with consequent high French unemployment.
Yes, that's indeed the usual foreign description.
Actually, French youth unemployment is not what it is usually made out to be, since free baccalaureate- and university-level education keeps young people out of the job market much longer than in most countries. As a result, as The Financial Times reported last weekend, the official figures are misleading. The newspaper calculates that 7.8 percent of French under-25s are actually out of work, as compared with 7.4 percent in Britain and 6.5 percent in Germany.
Amazing... Finally, a hard piece of data in one of these articles - and one that I have provided to my readers on European Tribune many times in the past few days - and already some time ago.
Youth unemployment is no worse in France than in the UK, the US or Germany.
left is the employment rate, right is the unemployed population, both as a fraction of the total number of 15-24s.
As Pfaff points out, one of the reasons for this is that French students have less of a need to work while they are studying:
The number in each country is the proportion of under 25s (thus the small inconsistency for Denmark) who BOTH work and study. That means that most students in the UK or the Netherlands are part of the active population, whereas in France they are not.
When you calculate the "unemployment rate", you calculate it as the number of unem^ployed to the active population. If that active population includes most students, it is inflated and the unemployment ratio appears correspondingly lower, even if the number of unemployed is the same. That's the cause of the difference in the headline unemployment number between France and the UK, for instance.
The French themselves have a theory that their nation is in decline, although sometimes this amounts simply to an interiorized version of the foreign accusation that France's problems come from its refusal to adopt the Anglo- American model of market capitalism.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Someone in a prominent position is finally repeating what I've been saying!
A larger explanation occurs to me, that France is the coal miner's canary of modern European society. France's rejection of the European Union constitutional treaty two years ago caused an international shock because the French rejected the view, all but universally held among European elites, that continuing expansion and market-liberalization are essential to the EU, indeed inevitable. This proved to be untrue, to the general relief of the European public.
Similarly, it seems to me that the current unrest in France signals wider popular resistance in Europe to the most important element in the new model of market economics, its undermining of the place of the employee in the corporate order, deliberately rendering the life of the employee precarious.
Did you see this: deliberately rendering the life of the employee precarious. THAT4s the real agenda of the corpocrats in the US and in Europe. It may take different forms in different countries, because the systems are different, but the direction is the same everywhere: make labor cheaper and more compliant.
The model's principal characteristic in the United States has been the transfer of wealth to stockholders and managers, and away from public interests (by tax cuts) and employees (through wage-depression and elimination of employee benefits).
My jaw actually dropped when I saw him write this. He saw the light! It's in black and white in the European edition of the New York Times! The transfer of wealth away from public interests and employees.
In this perspective, what in France seems to be a sterile defense of an obsolete social and economic order might be interpreted as a premonitory appeal for a new but humane model to replace it. It could be Europe's opportunity.
A number of you made fun of my claim that the French student's fight is very similar to your fights against the Bush machine in the US. And yet it is, in a very real sense. We are fighting the same ideology of wealth capture by the corporations from the workers and the State.
We have to show solidarity. will you believe me now that it's in the NYT?
