Youth force right to retreat
ALMOST to the year that Eduard Balladur's rightwing government was elected, he has found himself confronted with some very angry French youth. For nearly a month now, several hundreds of thousands of students, unemployed and semi-employed youth, teachers and other trade unionists have taken to the streets in protest. The government has been forced to withdraw legislation which cut minimum wage levels — but protests continue. RAGHU KRISHNAN Paris, 31 March 1994
We'd rather take to the streets than end up in them." With this slogan, student demonstrations last year set the tone for the more recent.
The current rightwing government is haunted by images of May 1968 when student protests led to a month-long general strike of 10 million workers and created a situation that sent De Gaulle scampering over to Germany to see if he had the support of French troops stationed there. More recently, it was student protests that eventually led to the fall of the 1986-1988 rightwing government led by Jacques Chirac.
The government of Edouard Balladur is all the more edgy because this is the latest and most widespread in a series of challenges, in particular the militant Air France strike, which began towards the end of last year.
At the same time, the first signs of student unrest emerged in opposition to plans to cut back student housing grants, against underfunding of the education system and a reduction in vacancies in the public service.
The next wave of protest arose in opposition to government plans to devote more public funds to the private (and largely Church-run) school system. On 16 January, the largest demonstration since the late 1960s brought some
750 thousand people from across the country to Paris, in defence of properlyfunded, universally accessible and secular education. Once again, Prime Minister Balladur was forced to retreat.
Just before the latest round of protests, violent clashes continued over several days in the suburbs of Paris — largely pitting the teenage children of Arab and Black immigrants against local police forces - following the murder of a teenager of Vietnamese origin and rumours that his killer had been set free.
The object of the current youth unrest is a package of government labour reforms — known as the "CIP" the French initials for "contract for professional integration" — that make it cheaper for employers to hire youth in all categories, including university and technical school graduates.
Although promoted by government spokespeople as a plan to fight unemployment, there is every reason to believe that the reforms will do nothing of the sort. Youth hired at the lower wage would be merely replacing an older worker neatly disposed of through an early retirement package or simply dismissed
Unemployment
In other cases, many youth that would have been hired at the full wage will now be taken on - after six months of unemployment for degree-holders — at a wage anywhere between 20% and 70% lower than before, according to age and the level of post-secondary education.
A job "created" in this way can last for a maximum of two years, after which time the employer can take the person on at the full wage or hire another cut-rate youngster. It is not difficult to figure out that the employer will usually go for the latter option - if the position is filled at all, that is.
An article in Le Monde, 18 March, put it best: "The CIP does not so much create as it does generalise the [youth minimum wage], with a 20% cut in the professional minimum wage for degreeholders. More generally, employment policy over the last 15 years has had hardly any effect on youth hiring, in spite of all the [tax and social security] exemptions offered to employers. At the same time, the over-50 age group has been massively oriented towards early retirement schemes. The result: access to employment is de facto reserved in the main for those between 30 and 50 years old."
The CIP blow has been hardest for the very students that accepted arguments about the need for people with a technical education. Since the 1980s, middle-class youth in all the Western industrialised countries have been told that this is the way to a secure future — and the way to lead their countries out of recession.
Now, government and employers are telling them that the economic and professional value of their degrees is not so great after all. And these technical graduates have seen their unemployment rate rise to ten percent, a five-fold increase in the last four years.
### Middle-class
No surprise, then, that it is the sons and daughters of "La France profonde" - white, middle-class families in cities and towns outside Paris - that now find themselves in the front line of a showdown with the government and its police.
But unemployment and insecurity run rampant through all categories of French youth. Nearly one quarter of France's 4 million unemployed are under twenty-five. Even for those with jobs, which are increasingly part-time, the situation is also unstable.
Many high schools and colleges are on strike, and some universities are occupied. However, the absence of student unions in the technical high schools and colleges has made it difficult to establish representative bodies to organise and be accountable to the movement. And there is certainly no question of the movement immediately turning for leadership to the established leftwing parties — the Socialist Party (PS), Communist Party (PCF), Greens, or the revolutionary left.
Demonstrations have taken place even in the smallest of communities and in some of the bigger cities - Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nantes - they have been joined by large contingents of
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high school youth and unemployed teenagers from the working class suburbs. These are often the largest and most militant contingents, and are certainly the most diverse in terms of their ethnic and gender composition.
The participation of these youth from the working class and heavily immigrant suburbs has increased the stakes of the stand-off, and touched the rawest nerve of the French right-wing. It seems there is nothing the country's rulers fear and hate more than the children of Arab and Black immigrants, all the moreso if they are joined by their white friends.
From the early to mid-1980s, it was the children of immigrant workers that were at the cutting edge of struggles for democracy and social justice. They have played a decisive role in each wave of mass youth protest, following their cross-country "Marche des Beurs" ("Beurs" is slang for the children of Arab immigrants) and the "Marche pour l'égalité".
Conditions for these youth are even worse - with estimates placing unemployment in their ranks at 50% - and further aggravated by constant police harassment and the growing xenophobic climate in the country.
The fact that their movement was betrayed and co-opted by the last PS government - and then frontally attacked by the right-wing - has been a significant contributing factor to the current despair and disorientation in their ranks.
The response of the authorities to the broadening of the movement to include these suburban youth has been as predictable as it has been unfortunate. In reply to some isolated incidents of looting and stone-throwing, the government - in the shape of the arch-reactionary Interior Minister Charles Pasqua — attempted to justify its stepped up repression of the whole movement by decrying the presence of those who were allegedly trying to use it to further their own violent and criminal ends.
The racial overtones have been barely hidden. To drive the point home, two teenage students of Algerian origin, Mouloud Madaci and Abdel Hakim
Youbi - both in France since childhood — were arrested after one of the demonstrations in Lyon and, without even a proper trial, expelled on a ship to
Algeria (see box). For now, at least, attempts such as this to divide and break the movement have been ineffective.
In general, demonstrators have had to contend with police repression. Some reports speak of plain-clothes police themselves smashing shop windows in order to invite the wrath of their uniformed colleagues. Arrested protesters have seen their rights curtailed in the courts, with sentences being pronounced before the required legal defence can be provided.
With the CIP now officially buried, and the student protests at their peak, the question of the future of the movement is now up in the air.
Seeing the CIP as a clear attack on their members and on workers rights generally, the country's trade union federations staged their first joint action since 1962, a nation-wide demonstration of some 200 thousand people on 12 March. In spite of the withdrawal of the CIP, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), which remains close to the PCF, has decided to go ahead with plans for a general strike on 7 April, now directed against the government's five-year economic plan.
### Decisive
The role played by university arts and science students will also be a decisive factor. In May 1968 it was these students that played the leading role. Thus far, they have largely remained on the sidelines, with the idea that the CIP would not affect them. There have been some signs of movement, however. In late March, for example, six-hundred students occupied university buildings at the Tolbiac campus of the University of Paris.
On April 6 a cross-country trek by the new "Act against unemployment!" campaign will begin. It is scheduled to end with a huge march on Paris at the end of workers and provide temporary and underpaid work to youth. Even dissenting voices within the government have said the new measures will create 15 thousand jobs at the most.
However, not one to mince words, the president of the National Employers'
Council, François Périgot, declared:
"There are only two ways to go — either to lower salaries, or to reduce
(employers') social security payments. It is a question of political opportunity."
Fighting words, which cannot go unanswered.
Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the threat of "social explosion" will continue to loom over the country for some time to come. *
A permanent provocation
THE expulsion to Algeria of Mouloud
Madaci and Abdel Hakim Youbi - two students arrested after a demonstration in Lyon - is the first overtly political use of the new immigration laws the Balladur government introduced soon after taking office in March 1993. The changes, known as the Pasqua laws, after the Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, essentially create two legal categories for youth born to immiar class treatment.
expulsion illegal, the Lyon police -May. The campaign involves with Pasqua's silent blessing have trade unionists, unemployed challenged the ruling. In the meantiactivists, housing rights acti- me, the two teenagers are awaiting vists and people from the their retur to France in the internatiowomen's and other social and nal transit zone of the port of Algiers. democratic movements. Protesters - first in Lyon, then
In the meantime, the nation-wide - have made the return government does not intend of the two the central demand of their to sit by and mourn the post-CIP actions. The slogan "Libérez death of the CIP. They have nos camarades!" ("Free our comalready announced new rades!") was at the forefront of the 31 "job creation" measures March demonstrations. Clearly, they expected to put six billion understand the moral and political stakes of this heinous act. - RK O francs ($1 billion) into the pockets of employers who hire youth over the next eighteen months.
Trade unions have already denounced this as another giveaway, which encourgaes employers to dismiss older
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The Lyon police invoked the harshest component of the law - meant for terrorists — to expel the two. While a national legal body has declared the
EX-YUGOSLAVIA
Second Workers' A