If employers have two years to make a decision about firing, that tells me two things:

1. New employees will figure they only have to take the job seriously for two years then can become unproductive sloths.
2. New employers, fearful of #1 above and the potential lifetime employees will have a wave of firing just less than two years after the contracts start getting signed.

The other possibility is the government is doing this as a ruse to get businesses to hire as mahy as possible then will decide the two year firing rule is against the law and will do away with it.

The end result will be a temporary probably minor drop in unemployment at best, and a load of bankruptcies after businesses get stuck with useless employees at worst.

(Love the photo of the bike with flowers on its handlebars...)

All the protesting, rioting, posturing...it's all so what France is about, unfortunately - this is how people here communicate. Wanna make sure that 'moi, moi, moi' benefits to the maximum from government largesse? Everyone somehow manages to organize lockdowns and marches. Amazing. Believe, organization is not a given here. Except when it comes to protesting.

The ''government'' (I use the word very very lightly) has been ordering the police NOT to intervene, to let the 'dear blond heads' have their say even if it means paying hundreds of thousands, even millions, to repair damage done to buildings and such. (The vast majority of students, who aren't protesting, can't get any classwork done and they've been trying to get the universities to get back to teaching them...I'm assuming with very little success. After all, their teachers and administrators were all on the barricades in 1968 or wish they had been...)

Of course, a good protest is too good to pass up and professional protestors will be in Paris Saturday to 'help' out, making sure as much damage as possible is done. I heard a spokesman from the policeman's union saying on TV that some professional hooligans had already been picked up by the police. He mentioned that they were foreigners...from Germany and somewhere else that I can't remember now...and that they were being brought in for the fun.

Made me think of Iraq and all the foreign 'insurgents' there.

Valerie :

About the word governement, we could rename it "dork-ernement", in french it would give something like "con-vernement", but I find "dorkernement" very funny.

Nice pics !! great works Hervé !! Why cannot we see them on french TV ? Oups, I forgot !! French televisions belongs the left !!

Nice texts too !! go on, go on !!
Long live CPE and f... FIDL and UNEF

David Martin, french neoconservator

French televisions channels do not belong to the left anymore, it used to... I mean : mainstream channels.

Stéphane, French pedestrian

Good Lord Carine! I think it's about time for you to move to le pays de la liberté. "Work kills"? And these people want France to be respected as a major world power? Is it like this in other EU countries? How long before the EU disintegrates? I say ten years at most. Come home, Carine!

If I can get anybody to take it, I'll bet Iraq passes France economicly within five years.

It is good to see Stephane disengaging himself from this rabble. Shows growth.

PT, third party observer

Papertiger :

How could I be in this rabble ? I am still in England.

"Just a note: I am not in favor of such a law because I do not think the state should have anything to do between me and my employer..."

I don't understand this quote. Isn't the state already involved in the relationship with your employer when they tell the employer that you can't be fired? Isn't this law a step towards moving the state further out of the relationship between you and your employer by allowing them to make independent decisions?

I just walked down from Montparnasse, over to the Panthéon and down past the Place de la Sorbonne...stupid, stupid, mindless destruction. I don't know what to say. As a foreigner and a student I am shocked and disgusted.

This morning after class, I had a conversation with a lovely girl from Kenya. She told me that all of her life, she has been reading books on France and thinking what a wonderful civilised place it was going to be...her dream was to come and attend school to improve her prospects. She too is amazed and disgusted...and she's thinking maybe Kenya isn't so bad after all. Me? I think I'll head to Spain for a bit.

Funny, I took the same photo "travailler, pour quoi faire?" as you (along with the police vans etc....) it struck me the same way...

Charlemagne :

Well, maybe it's the problem of being in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

For example : since I arrived in England, my french friend and me have encountered some pointless hatred against french, but it still like (a lot) England and English people (especially english girls, who are beautiful).

There are very positive things in every country, try to enjoy them as much as possible.

In the US such a law would eventually be ruled unconsitutional. Not due to any over-riding legal principle but due to the left-leaning ideology of the nanny-state judiciary. Even the newly consituted US Supreme Court may not be immune from allowing big government decision-making in what should be employer-employee relations.

My question: In France would there be any judicial review of such a law that could be swayed by popular animus? Or does your system grant more power to the executive under Napoleonic statute?

CommonSenseMan,

Yes and no. I'm against it because it is one more law, one more contract, more conditions. The anti-CPE are claiming employers will be able to fire them for whatever reason and whenever they want in the first two years, but it is simply more complicated. There will be conditions to meet (they've tried that kind of contract earlier, the CNE, Contrat Nouvelle Embauche and most of those who have been laid off have sued their employers for abusive firing... and won). Plus it's only for those under 26 years old.

It seems to be in the right direction, as I said, but doing the right thing would be to simply forget the entire labor code and let employers and potential employees mind their business wihtout any intervention from the State.

That's what I meant.

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Charlemagne,

In case you're interested, there's a counter-demonstration against the strikes and in favor of the liberty to study, tomorrow at 2 pm, Place de la Sorbonne.

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Stéphane,

Which country, today, isn't a bit anti-French, exactly? Can you tell me?

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Neal Phenes,

If I'm not mistaken, the Conseil constitutionnel could do just that. Only it can be seized only by the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, the President of the National Assembly or of the Senate, 60 deputies or 60 senators.

Thanks for the clarification. But I don't even want to think about the chaos that would ensue if the French government did the "right thing" and were to "simply forget the entire labor code and let employers and potential employees mind their business wihtout any intervention from the State." I'm not getting the impression from the news that your suggestiong is the kind of reform the students have in mind.

Neal,

Employment at will is the law in most states in the US. Most of the rest of the states allow firing employees for cause. The new french law is much more restrictive -- allowing employment at will only for the first two years of employment.

Carine :

How should I know ? I know only students in England (well 95% of them are student). And I have no problem at all, all the English, American, German, Italian, Spanish etc... because they all like me (especially the americans).

Actually, I only had troubles (very littles most of the time) with drunk people between 40 and 50 years old.

The only big trouble that I heard, happened to an american friend of mine, he was attacked by three english old men who wanted to "cut his balls", my other friends told me that it was because they heard him talking with an american accent (by the way, I love american accent, but that's not new). Fortunately when it happened, the police passed by almost immediatly so they did not hurt him.

Thanks for the clarification. While ridiculous labor laws protecting incompetent workers or union barbarism has increased the cost of labor drastically in the US, we still survive competitively due to other countries making life even worse for employers (except for our cars).

Freedom of contract that was upheld in Lochner v NY was discussed recently in a piece done by Larry Reed on a forgotten US Supreme Court Chief Justice Fuller. http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7642

"Every law school student studies the Fuller court’s decision in Lochner v. New York, which is routinely held up as emblematic of "heartless" 19th century laissez faire.New York law made it a criminal offense for both the employer and the employee whenever bakery employees worked more than 10 hours in one day, with no exceptions even for emergencies. Fuller joined the court’s majority in throwing the law out because he saw it as a "featherbedding" nanny state intrusion that was condescendingly paternalistic toward workers. If workers could be drafted by the government to put their lives on the line in battle, why couldn’t they be trusted to decide for themselves if they wanted to work long hours in a bakery?"

This is not where current US jurisprudence is.