France's Youth On Trial

France's youth on trial

Published: March 15 2006 02:00 Last updated: March 15 2006 02:00


Dominique de Villepin is being pilloried for the one thing he is doing right: making a courageous attempt to make his country's youth more employable. France's prime minister has suffered a sharp drop in his opinion poll rating for pushing the "first job contract" law through parliament in the face of massive university sit-ins and union demonstrations aimed at forcing him now to repeal it. The stakes are high. If he stands firm, France has a chance of beginning to lower the 23 per cent jobless rate among its young, and Mr de Villepin a fair shot at the Elysée palace next year. If he backtracks, his credibility as a presidential candidate will crumble along with those for labour market reform.

France has an unhappy history of trying to prod its young into jobs. Insufficient vocational training and a high university drop-out rate are partly to blame. But so are rigid minimum wage and redundancy laws that make French employers reluctant to give regular contracts of indefinite duration to less skilled or experienced workers who are so often the young. Yet attempts to devise lower levels of pay and redundancy compensation for the young are resented as discrimination. The upshot is that young people just tend to go from one temporary contract (if they are lucky) to another. Mr de Villepin's innovation has been to try to entice employers to give the young a footing on the ladder of regular work. His new law allows employers to dispense with the usual redundancy restrictions if they choose to dismiss workers under the age of 26 during the first two years of their contract.

This has been greeted with outrage. Student groups gripe the young are being treated as "the Kleenex generation", used and then discarded. They seem oblivious to the fact such criticism is far better directed at the fixed-term contract system and to the plight of all those young unemployed who vented their frustration by burning cars in the poorer suburbs of Paris and other cities last autumn.

Meanwhile, the opposition Socialists are asking the constitutional court to overturn the law. They and trade union leaders fear the new law will be the thin end of the wedge aimed at making the labour code for all workers more flexible. Hopefully, it will be. But that may be too much to expect with the presidential election little more than a year away.

However, this half-reform can be made to stick if the centre-right holds solid behind Mr de Villepin. President Jacques Chirac has a record of retreat in the face of student opposition, but yesterday said he backed Mr de Villepin. Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr de Villepin's presidential rival on the right, has been less explicit in his support. But reversal of the law would also complicate his calls for reform. This issue ropes the three centre-right leaders together like climbers on a mountain: if one slips the others will too.