In London last week I was stuck in a traffic jam behind a St.Patrick’s Day parade. My cab driver was not impressed: “Why do we close streets and cause all this mayhem for St. Patrick’s Day when we don’t even commemorate St. George’s!” he grumbled. I sat quietly and watched the carnival atmosphere: Young men their faces painted green, youths draped in Irish flags, pale faces beneath colorful hats and scarves, all of them intent on having a good time. Then I arrived in France and found people on the streets for altogether different reasons.
Dressed in the student uniform of blue jeans and backpacks, thousands of young people descended onto the streets to march against “la précarité”. It was the latest in a series of protests against the First Employment Contract (CPE).
Unemployment is a major problem in France, particularly among the young. Currently almost one in four people under 26 are unemployed. France is also famously very rigid in its employment laws. This is not the US where employers can more or less hire and fire at will. Nor is it Sweden with its model of “flexicurity” — flexibility for employers matched by a generous state social security system.
The CPE is Dominique De Villepin’s answer to France’s youth unemployment; he has staked his political future on it. It is a contract which essentially gives employers a two year opt-out from the burden of French employment law in return for creating jobs for the under 26. It has not been well received. There have been demonstrations and riots, with over a million people taking to the streets throughout the country on Saturday. The CPE has been a rallying call for trade unions and for the left. They are baying for De Villepin’s blood and they may well get it.
Maybe it’s because I have spent so much time in Britain where job fluidity is a fact of life, I don’t quite get what the fuss is about. I don’t understand the fury engendered by this legislation.
The key is “la precarité”: Insecurity or precariousness. It’s a word you hear ad-nauseum in France these days. Just last month, the Cesars — the French Academy Awards — were disrupted when protesters stormed the stage. Freelance technicians and artists were protesting against changes in unemployment benefit that have made it harder for them to claim benefits in between jobs. Again and again as celebrities pledged their support for the protesters, they used the P word. Precariousness is like a nightmare that hovers over the French psyche.
It’s a good word, precariousness, both as an image and as a concept. As an image it brings to mind someone losing their footing and falling off a ladder. As a concept it shows us to be at the whim of fate and circumstances beyond our control, constantly exposed to danger and unable to relax even for an instant. It aptly describes the lives of millions of people in the world today, for instance the 25, 000 people who die every day because they do not have access to clean water. Life is indeed precarious for two-thirds of the planet, but why has it become such an issue in one of the richest nations on the globe?
France clearly feels that her way of life is threatened. The threat comes from globalization, from free-market liberalism, from anything that might lead to reform and change in another’s image.
It’s interesting for me as an Arab to witness this. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the barricade mentality I often hear in Arab discourse on reform and modernization. We in the Arab world have been held back by a longing to recreate a long lost glorious past. We often look back rather than forward and we insist on protecting mores and customs that hold us back just because they happen to be part of our heritage.
There is some sense of this too in France. The French take great pride in their heritage — and with good reason — but this is coupled with a sense of threat from the storm of capitalist economic liberalism blowing in from the Anglo-Saxon world.
The comparison with Britain is often made in the press. The British economy is consistently outperforming the French economy. Unemployment in Britain is less than three percent. Of course Britain has undergone extensive economic and social reform over the last two decades, the kind of reforms that those on the political right in France argue are necessary for France to modernize and survive. But the price is what many in France would describe as economic precariousness.
There was a time when if you got into university you were more or less guaranteed a job on graduating. Once you passed the initial probation period and your employers formally accepted you into the fold, you signed on for a job for life. When I worked in the petrochemical industry, I met executives from companies like Shell and Total who had reached retirement age without ever having worked for anyone else. Just as civil servants in Saudi Arabia like my father who joined the Foreign Ministry at the age of 17 knew that they would spend their lives serving their country. Life, as a friend of mine likes to put it, was a highway. You drove on straight ahead, observing the speed limits and knowing that eventually you would reach your exit.
Those days are gone. We live in precariousness, our futures threatened by global terrorism, environmental destruction and social instability. I don’t know whether the CPE is a viable solution to French unemployment but I strongly sense that precariousness is here to stay. ([email protected])
