My Friends! Mes Amis! Don’t Become Like the United States!

by Tula Connell, Mar 22, 2006

Student protests throughout France have taken to the streets against the government’s proposal to give employers the right to fire employees under age 26 without giving any reason.

(In this country, that’s called “at will” employment—and unless you have a union, it can happen to anyone, any age.)

The student action recently resulted in some 40 universities partially or totally shutting down, with the Paris Sorbonne University, site of the May 1968 student uprising, cordoned off after police used force to evict several hundred protesters who had occupied the buildings for three days.

Given that France has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the European Union, and considering the unrest last fall in which young Muslims took to the streets to protest lack of job opportunities and discrimination, shifting into reverse gear for young workers seems almost, well…like something Bush would do.

Find out more global news—including looming strikes in Germany’s metal sector and new union membership figures in Great Britain—from Brother Harry Kelber’s World of Labor.

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