Common Folk Using Common Sense

Rampaging French youths set fire to cars and looted shops in Paris on Thursday, marring protests against a youth jobs law that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, in a conciliatory move, agreed to discuss with unions. Throughout much of last week, hundreds of thousands of students in France were angrily protesting, and they have been joined by the major French labor unions, which are threatening a general strike. Villepin has championed the law, known by the initials CPE, as a key tool in the battle to cut youth unemployment of 23%. Business groups and many political leaders say France’s broad labor protections are to blame for high youth unemployment.

Why the unrest? Because their place in the great French social welfare state is being threatened. More specifically, they’re rioting because they are actually facing the prospect of having to earn their jobs and work to keep them.

Giving employers flexibility in dismissing young workers during a two-year trial period may seem modest by the standards of other countries. But the French jealously guard a costly benefit system that makes firing workers extremely difficult. Employers say those benefits discourage hiring and job creation.

The solution was basic, rational, logical and simple. Remove the onerous restrictions on employers hiring younger workers, and that is exactly what France’s prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, did. Under new regulations a French employer is allowed to hire someone 26 years old and younger on a two-year trial basis. After those two years the full range of employment guarantees would kick in. The whole point of the law was to encourage companies to hire young people.

Wow. Imagine that. You might get fired from your first job. Oh God, the horror!

These young people in France really believe that they should be able to be hired at their tender ages and that a company must not be allowed to fire them from their first day at work (except “for cause,” which, as we are learning in America, is increasingly difficult to establish). In America, most of us would call the French young people’s attitudes “childish”, “immature”, or “spoiled.”

• Socialism teaches its citizens to expect everything, even if they contribute nothing.
• Socialism teaches its citizens that they have a plethora of rights and few corresponding obligations – except to be taxed.

And that is why the citizens of less socialist (and more religious) America give more charity per capita and per income than do citizens of socialist countries. That is why Americans volunteer time for the needy so much more than citizens of socialist countries do. That is why citizens of conservative states in America give more charity than citizens of liberal states do. The more Left one identifies oneself on the political spectrum, the more that person is likely to believe that the state, not fellow citizens, should take care of the poor and the needy.

Under socialism, one is not only liberated from having to take care of oneself; one is also liberated from having to take care of others. The state will take care of me and of everybody else. The socialist idea sounded altruistic to those who began it, and it sounds altruistic to the naive who believe in it today. In practice, however, it creates self-centered individuals and a narcissistic society. So while it may have begun as a way to help others, it has come to mean a way of evading responsibility for oneself and for others.

France has a real problem with youth unemployment. The general nationwide rate is 23%. In some minority neighborhoods the youth unemployment is much higher. There’s a reason for this. Young people in France don’t have a work history to tout when they’re out there looking for a job. A prospective employer has no job history to review when considering a young French man or woman for employment. If an employer decides to take a chance on a young employee with no job history, and if that young employee turns out to be a slacker, the employer is, to coin a phrase, pretty much screwed. French law protects the slacker. Job guarantees make it a very expensive proposition for an employer to get rid of a bad employee. One good way for a French employer to protect himself is to hire an experienced worker; someone with a good track record. The result? Young workers have more difficulty finding a job.

Now you understand what the French “youth” and their labor union friends are so upset about. These new regulations might actually mean that they will have to prove themselves at work. No longer will these kids be able to walk into their new workplace with instant job protection. This is so contrary to the great French social welfare state. The government is supposed to protect these people. They aren’t supposed to have to to go out there and actually work to earn their employment status. It’s supposed to be guaranteed by the state. Your life belongs to the state and the state must provide.

What these massive demonstrations reveal is the narcissism, laziness and irresponsibility inculcated by socialist (a.k.a. “French” or “Euro”) societies. Personal responsibility? Non.

Youths threw stones at police and set fire to the door of an apartment building in running battles at the end of a largely peaceful rally by thousands of students and workers against the CPE First Job Contract. Dozens of young people, many wearing masks or hoods, overturned cars, smashed shop windows and robbed student demonstrators of clothes and mobile phones, witnesses said. Police said they had arrested 42 people.

“This time, there are lots of young criminals on the march who are there to steal and smash,” said Charlie Herblin, a 22-year-old worker on the march.

Clashes also erupted in the western city of Rennes, where about 300 to 400 youths battled with police. Tens of thousands of students marched in cities throughout France, including Tours, Orleans and Marseille, as part of rolling protests.

Protests over the measure have disrupted three-quarters of the country’s 84 universities and Education Minister Gilles de Robien said looming exams could be postponed until the autumn. The dispute has galvanized aggressively leftist student unions, which tend to be dominated by middle- and upper-class young people who are not, if you can believe this, the primary victims of unemployment. Marches, campus takeovers and skirmishes with riot police have shut down dozens of universities in past weeks.

Enough generations of socialist policies have now passed for us to judge their effects. They are bleak. Socialism undermines the character of a nation and of its citizens. In simpler words, socialism makes people worse. That is why France is so frightened of the utterly rational idea that a young person should have a two-year trial period at work before being granted a lifetime job. Such an innovation in France would mean that young people would have to work hard and earn the right to lifetime employment. But if socialism means anything, it means that one shouldn’t have to earn anything. One merely has to breathe.

youth, Villepin, unemployment, welfare, France, employment

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