Yesterday, I commented about how French wine makers resorted to violence and destruction of property to protest against competition. Well, there is more news about how the French react in the face of reforms they don’t like. In the last few weeks, students and labor unions have been marching down the streets of French cities to protest against a labor-law reform meant to bring some much-needed flexibility to the French labor market.
French students and trade unions staged protest marches across the country on Wednesday against far-reaching labor reforms, testing President Francois Hollande’s mettle as he tries to lower an unemployment rate still stuck above 10 percent.
Organizers said hundreds of thousands of people took part and the interior ministry put the figure at 224,000…
Up to 100,000 young people took part in Wednesday’s rallies, the unions said. Some 90 of France’s 2,500 secondary schools were blocked by their students, the education ministry said.
Their beef with the reforms is that they threaten “job security.” Never mind that French job security means that a lot of people can’t find jobs because it has become too risky to hire someone whom may not work out in the end. As a result, unemployment is high and many people can only get part-time jobs. Here is one of the “terrible” reforms that drove people to the streets:
Although the official working week would remain set at 35 hours, unions and employers would be able to negotiate in-house deals to spread the workload over three years, and increase it to a maximum of 46 hours over 16 consecutive weeks.
Moreover, since blocking secondary-school students from going to school wasn’t enough, the protestors decided that it would be appropriate to throw stones at the police:
Protesters threw stones in Paris and French police sprayed tear gas during new strikes and demonstrations against proposed changes to France’s work week and layoff practices.
Covering their faces with hoods and scarves, some of the few hundred students demonstrating carried a banner reading “General Burnout – (Labor Minister Myriam) El Khomri to the ground. We are going to burn down all of Paris.”
After threatening to burn Paris to the ground yesterday — look at that – they actually tried to burn down a high school in a suburb of Paris called Levallois-Perret.
As you can see in the video here, people are cheering the protestors on.
Now, this violence makes me wonder what these guys (for lack of a better word) will do when the French government finally adopts the kind of reforms it has to adopt to jump-start its economy and reduce its unemployment rate. Better yet, what will they do when France ends up like Greece in a severe financial crisis because it has refused to implement any reforms in the name of the crazy sense that everyone should be entitled to a job, high pay, six weeks of paid vacation, a 35-hour work week, and loads of government subsidies?