Youth force right to retreat
International Viewpoint #255 April 1994
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
### FRANCE
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
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" 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 educa-
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 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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International Viewpoint #255 April 1994 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 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
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' 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 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 immi-
gration laws the Balladur goverment
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
in France, with immigrants (and those
born to immigrants) getting second
ranks.
The response of the authorities to the broadening of the movement to include these suburban youth has been as precomponent of the law - meant for terrorists - to expel the two. While a dictable as it has been unfortunate. In reply to some isolated incidents of lootnational legal body has declared the expulsion illegal, the Lyon police - ing and stone-throwing, the government with Pasqua's silent blessing - have
- in the shape of the arch-reactionary challenged the ruling. In the meanti-
Interior Minister Charles Pasqua — me, the two teenagers are awaiting attempted to justify its stepped up their retum to France in the internatiorepression of the whole movement by nal transit zone of the port of Algiers.
decrying the presence of those who were
Protesters - first in Lyon, then allegedly trying to use it to further their nation-wide - have made the return own violent and criminal ends.
of the two the central demand of their
The racial overtones have been barepost-CIP actions. The slogan "Libérez ly hidden. To drive the point home, two nos camarades!" ("Free our comteenage students of Algerian origin, rades!") was at the forefront of the 31
Mouloud Madaci and Abdel Hakim
March demonstrations. Clearly, they
Youbi — both in France since childunderstand the moral and political hood - were arrested after one of the stakes of this heinous act. - RK O 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 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
May. The campaign involves trade unionists, unemployed activists, housing rights activists and people from women's and other social and democratic movements.
In the meantime, the government does not intend to sit by and mourn the death of the CIP. They have already announced new
"job creation" measures expected to put six billion 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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class treatment. The Lyon police invoked the harshest 5
Ex-YUGOSLAVIA
Second Workers' Aid convoy