So what's the deal with these riots in Paris?

Imagine if you could be summarily sacked from your job for any reason, for any time up to two years from the beginning of employment. But that also the contracts were only for those up to 25. Young French people think this means their rights - the ones enjoyed by their parents and every single employed civil cervant who now wants to pass this law - are shortly due for pissing on in what they'd call "anglo-saxon" ways maybe, but a UK employer can only sack like that in the first three months. So onto the streets they go, and it's an issue that unites the bainlieues and the BCBGs.

Obviously WRT work law in the EC, can't see how it would stand up in Europe!

ne travaillez jamais, as some guy once said...

That's the labour law they are trying to pass, which makes the young adults it covers feel less than equal.

Actually, no, I think we can say pretty definitelt they are rioting against laws that would actively make things worth.

People always say rioters don't have any solutions, but who' s going to say "Hi, I'm Jacques, the reason I'm here burning cop cars is this, and my solution to the underlying problems is this, and here's my phone number if you want to discuss it further . ."

i seem to remember the '68 riots throwing up a fair amount of high-level thinking...

But that also the contracts were only for those up to 25.

But I don't get why this part isn't reasonable:

Imagine if you could be summarily sacked from your job for any reason, for any time up to two years from the beginning of employment.

A lot of European countries have special youth contracts offering a little less social protection in order to encourage employers to hire young people. France has a youth unemployment rate of 22 percent (compared with 13 percent in the UK), which is incredibly high and which is just storing up trouble. At this stage of the game, anything that might encourage employers to hire young people is a good thing. I don't think having a one-year summary fire contract is really a terrible imposition on people under 26, since people in their early 20s tend to chop and change jobs pretty frequently anyway. Given the choice between no job and one with initially less protection, I'm guessing most unemployed would choose the latter. It's absurd to deny that there's no correlation between the labour market rigidities you have in France and the high level of unemployment. Not to mention the high level of people forced to work on short-term contracts because employers are too scared to give them a permanent contract, or even the deadening effect on people in proper full-time employment but who are stuck in dead-end jobs they can't move from.

That said, I don't think this is the key reason for France's unemployment, which is the "charges sociales" that employers have to pay under the social insurance system, whereby each employee pays around 20 percent of his/her salary in social security, and the employer pays an equal amount. This ultimately amounts to a tax on jobs and discourages employers from hiring. The revenue raised should be sought by other means, where it doesn't act as a penalty on employing.

xpost

what about elasticity though? a factory's demand for widgets decreases 70% over three years; how do they deal with the large employment rolls they no longer can afford??

xpost: they have to lay them off, obv.

That's why I said "that they can afford to keep."

Tracer, I've never had a job; I'm not out of high school yet and illness has kept me from getting a part-time job so far. Hence my naive allegiance to the most basic of high school economics.

Of all the terrible bosses I've had, I don't know if I've ever had one that could be so described. And really I have to wonder, would they last long in most fields?

I guess I just can't wrap my American capitalist head around this whole debate. I'll stay here in San Francisco where my boss can fire me whenever he wants, but I can start my own company and hire and fire who I please too.

i guess in terms of the CPE, i've heard that this is just a first step in a general erosion of workers' rights in france. "today the youth, tomorrow everyone." etc. i don't know how well this accords with villepin's record, if this seems a likely scenario.

i'm sympathetic, in theory at least, to the argument that the supposed extreme difficulty of firing people would help keep the unemployment figures up. and that the law as it currently stands makes it difficult for french firms to make the sort of structural adjustments i was alluding to in my last post. i mean, sometimes you need to hire a lot of people, and then later you need to fire them if the economy (or your sector of it) is doing poorly. and as noted, although you may sue a boss for wrongful termination (btw firing someone because of structural changes in the economy is NOT wrongful termination), in the US there isn't really much of a bureaucratic apparatus that would discourage bosses from firing people. so in a sense this is (as often happens) the french fighting to retain a right that we could only dream of (if indeed we would wish to dream of it). which doesn't make the protests invalid of course! just sort of bemusing from an american perspective.

or what mikef said.

sorry if my post is a bit incoherent. am writing in a rush.