French labour laws trigger immense protests

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
dont think that the students are in unision - there have been clashes between students in some universities who want classes to resume. these are the students who are not issued from the rich, middle class bourgeois families who can afford to strike and take extra time in university. they are the ones who need to finish their studies fast so they can get a job.

This is a gross mischaracterization. Among those who are interested in the matter, social-background won't give you a significant difference between the supporters or the opponents of student strikes. The reason why the middle classes are overrepresented among the student strikers is:
1. People from poor families are much, much less likely to enter uni than the children of the middle and upper class.
2. People from a poorer background are more likely to be politically apathetic
These are grave problems in the French society, but it's not the problem with the protesters.

france is a sick country. first youve got the poor immigrants rioting, now you have the rich middle class students, hijacking the universities from those who need to get their studies done.

Bull****. The striker students pretty much mirror the French student population.

these students think its the return of may 68.

False. You have more than one million of protesters, there are hundreds of thousands of students among them (not counting the striker students who didn't go to the demos), and OTOH you have a few hundreds of people breaking things at the Sorbonne. The rioters of the Sorbonne are not representative at all of the protesting population. Far cry.

an employer can fire any employee under the age of 26 and with less than 2 years of work at will. that employee will then get 2000 euros a month (or something like that ) for the next three months, after which he can then get unemployment benefits.

Not quite. The employee will get 8% of the cumulated wages he earned since the beginning of the contract. This is less than the 10% currently in force in the time-constrained contracts.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by VetLegion
I'd say that youth unemployment is more of a lifestyle thing.

How many French students finish their studies by the age of 22?

I don't know. However, "young" is defined as "15-25 included" in French statistics, so the more relevant question, as far as stats go, would be "How many French students finish their studies by the age of 25?". Well, plenty of them.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

High unemployment is an injustice and the policies that create it are well known. I wonder why the French left are so keen to defend those policies?

It couldn't be to keep them as a political base, could it Dan?

We consistently fail to mobilize the long-term unemployed, and those who live in the most precarious conditions.

They tend to be largely apathetic. They are also more likely to follow Sarkozy or Le Pen because of the simplicity of their speeches.

[DanS]

Sarkozy seems like an able, energetic, practical-minded fellow.

[VetLegion]

He seems like an able, energetic, practical-minded fellow with no vision and only short term reflexes to me. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Shi Huangdi
How many of those are recent hires? A company that goes through all the effort and cost of hiring and training someone only to give them the boot right after is wasting money.

Don't forget that there are many jobs where the manpower barely needs any formation. Workers, McJobs etc. are easily expandable. Tell me, would Home Depot feel a serious loss if it laid off your friend?

As far as formation is concerned, there are (grossly) two kinds of jobs: those where the individual employee is an asset that deserves serious & continuous investment, and those where the employees perform basic tasks, and are thus easily replaceable.

Your argument does hold water when it comes to the first category (but even then, things aren't that obvious, as Che pointed out). However, your argument doesn't correspond at all to the reality when it comes to the second category. The ability to fire the person at will is likely to be considered as more worthy than what little formation you'd give to the replacement.

The second category is the one that will suffer the most from the added precarity (it already suffers the most from the current precarious contracts). Incidentally, the under-educated are overwhelmingly found in the ghettoes, and the recent reforms on education will allow to segregate them out of the education system even sooner.

This isn't some controversial economic theory Che, this is common sense. If you were purchasing a service, wouldn't you be alot more hesitant to do so if it locked you into a long term contract, as opposed to one which gave you a trial period where you could could cancel without penalty?

France already has a trial period. It can last up to 6 months (for upper management). It depends on the kind of job (it lasts 1 to 2 weeks for workers).
To that, you can add that most low-ranking employees are first "tested" during a precarious contract. For example, when I was working on a construction site, several of my young colleagues had been hired after spending several monthes in precarious contracts, where they could have been fired every month. I also have colleagues who were fired.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by VetLegion
He seems like an able, energetic, practical-minded fellow with no vision and only short term reflexes to me. But maybe I'm wrong.

Oh, he does have a vision. He wants:
- to considerably increase the prisoner population
- to considerably increase the powers of the police and of the prosecution
- to turn France into an at-will state
- to do away with the 35-hour workweek, so that the workweek can be dramatically extended
- to strengthen the role of the president, by making the president having much more involvement in domestic matters
- to privatise considerable chunks of healthcare, retirement and education.
- to build mosques with taxpayer's money
- to launch affirmative action
- to increase the role of the market in housing matters

There's a reason why pretty much all Yanks love him. In nearly every aspect of his programme, he wants to make France like the US.

[DanS]

We build mosques with taxpayer money?

I think any Yank would agree with about half of his platform, which is the best that could be expected from any French politician.

[Shi Huangdi]

Don't forget that there are many jobs where the manpower barely needs any formation. Workers, McJobs etc. are easily expandable. Tell me, would Home Depot feel a serious loss if it laid off your friend?

Even if those kinds of jobs there is some training. A worker who has been at a place for a considerable period of time is a strong asset if the person has proved himself a hard worker and someone who is dependable.

Even in jobs with little investment in the laborer, you're still likely to see more jobs created for them if labor is flexible and can move easily from struggling firms/industries to growing firms/industries. Firms/industries that are stuck with a labor population that is too great for the demand can often plunge downward if they can't compensate for a decrease in sales. Sucsessful firms/industries that will in the long run employ more people are likely to spring up if there is a supply of labor available in the economy.

There's a reason why pretty much all Yanks love him. In nearly every aspect of his programme, he wants to make France like the US.

France has a good thing going with much of it's social protections that it afford to it's population. And it's nice that unlike in the Anglo-Saxon countries, French workers don't end up with 50+ hour excessively long schedules. But the fact is you are facing agressive competition from everywhere. The key is to try to figure out how to keep conditions good for your workers while still remaining agile enough to deal with global competition.

[Drake Tungsten]

There's a reason why pretty much all Yanks love him. In nearly every aspect of his programme, he wants to make France like the US.

Actually, I think we like him because he doesn't seem to despise us and our Anglo-Saxon brethren like the rest of France.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by DanS
We build mosques with taxpayer money?

That was the "nearly" part.

I think any Yank would agree with about half of his platform, which is the best that could be expected from any French politician.

Vetlegion: QED

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by DanS
Sarkozy seems like an able, energetic, practical-minded fellow.

9/10

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Spiffor
France already has a trial period. It can last up to 6 months (for upper management). It depends on the kind of job (it lasts 1 to 2 weeks for workers).

According to what I've heard (I had an informative talk with a law student who wrote a memoir on labor laws) it can be up to two years for high responsibility positions.

To that, you can add that most low-ranking employees are first "tested" during a precarious contract. For example, when I was working on a construction site, several of my young colleagues had been hired after spending several monthes in precarious contracts, where they could have been fired every month. I also have colleagues who were fired.

To be fair, the CPE actually cancels the employer's right to fire you arbitrarily ('trial period') once you've done your two years.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris
To be fair, the CPE actually cancels the employer's right to fire you arbitrarily ('trial period') once you've done your two years.

The CPE sets the trial period to two years for every "stable" job. I these jobs, the currently existing trial period is much shorter.

The CPE doesn't make other forms of precarious employment (such as interim and time-constrained jobs) disappear.

[Fake Boris]

What about a CDD? say you work in a CDD, then you are offered a CDI. Does the time you did in the CDD count against the trial period?