By Libby Purves (THE TIMES, 21/03/06):
IN PARIS, as the demonstrations raged, everybody had a view. On the Eurostar a middle-aged couple told me with eloquent gestures that the students on the streets of the Latin Quarter were imbéciles. It was not, said the man, like the événements of 1968 (not that he himself was there in 1968, being from Nîmes). Then when I checked into the hotel, after an hour of weaving round the fringes of the yelling and sirens, the young receptionist gave me an earful about how a wicked government was curtailing the workers’ rights to dignity and security. Then again, at the entirely unconnected meeting I went for, several people returned to the subject of how les jeunes ought to be glad of anything that makes employers less afraid of hiring them.
Other people’s rows are oddly liberating. You are freed from the close, bitter emotion of domestic politics (these days it is impossible to consider any UK issue without wondering whether it will bring down Tony Blair). In the French case one need not care about Dominique de Villepin, and can consider the question dispassionately. And this one has universal resonance: it is about first jobs for the young. We all remember our own start, and a lot of us have children.
What the French Government wants and the students resent is this: a “first job contract” (contrat première embauche) would give employers the right to sack workers under 26 during their first two years, without giving a justification. It also relieves such employers of contributing to social benefits. “Contract for Slavery!” said the banners, with cartoons showing young workers being dumped in the rubbish bin. On the other hand, since French youth unemployment stands at 23 per cent, the Government’s hope is that this will loosen things up and make employers more ready to take on young workers. They dismiss fears that it will lead to exploitation and make life even harder; the man from Nîmes insisted that it will give les gosses (kids) a much-needed chance to prove themselves débrouillards (resourceful) and show their worth.
It resonates throughout the liberal Western world. Sacking employees is, in France, even more ponderous and fraught than in the UK: and even here employers groan at the processes, the pitfalls, the need for repeated written warnings and the ever-present threat of the tribunal. Many will tell you that they employ as few people as possible, cutting corners and overworking the rest, simply because people have become the most troublesome and cumbersome part of any enterprise.
Much employment law is good and necessary. People have families, mortgages, commitments. It is not fair for richer and more powerful people to treat them cavalierly. But what the French proposal opens up is the idea that if you are under 26 you probably don’t have such heavy commitments and chiefly need to get a foothold and show your mettle (why else is there such a boom in unpaid “internships” that once would have been jobs?). Loosen up the regulation, and you might get a brave new world in which young employees lead a precarious but exhilarating life, proving themselves during their first couple of years. Or, alternatively, a cruel and snubbing world in which honest young things are repeatedly chucked on the scrapheap.
It echoes that most exhilarating of TV reality shows — the only one I can face, actually — The Apprentice. When the alarming and bristly Sir Alan Sugar barks “Yer fired!” at each week’s loser, alongside the pity and vicarious terror I keep finding a small sneaky sense of relief. Those who stump away humiliated do not look as if they are wrecked for life, but as if they’ve been given something to think about. Many of them need it: the main entertainment of the show is the way these brash young wannabe tycoons talk 22-carat MBA nonsense about “divergent and convergent strategic phasing” while making elementary mistakes such as spending three hours arguing about whether to put kittens on a calendar, or ordering 100 whole chickens as toppings for 100 pizzas. They sulk a lot; one team leader refused to delegate anything, another kept claiming “I’m a good manager” but failed to intervene when an underling petulantly hurled dough around.
When these defects are pointed out to them by the remorseless Sir Alan, they bridle and defend themselves with the mantras of vapid self-esteem: “I’ve got confidence. I can be the best” or “I’m a winner”. To which the boss retorts: “No yer not, yer lost!” When they proudly say “I can learn from this” he brutally says he is not some “College of Further Education for dumbos” and that they’ve “pissed away £800 quid of his money”. One longs for Sir Grumpy to conduct similar sessions with ministers and civil servants who repeatedly foul up government IT procurement, bring chaos to the family credit system and waste millions of our money on Domes or useless “individual learning accounts”.
The hard fact is that sometimes a knockback, a sacking, a humiliation is salutary. My best bosses in early life were not the ones who were the kindest, but the ones who rejected articles or radio features and made me do them again. Alan Coren, I may shockingly reveal, was a holy terror: his “Nah! Not funny!” resonates in my ears to this day. As a freelance I have lost plenty of jobs; on each occasion the impulse is to mutter “ bastards!” but then work out just why they went off me.
It’s hard, being a young worker. Losing your job is awful. But it is worse not to have one in the first place. And if the system really did loosen up, creating ever more openings, there should always be another one to go to. Maybe M de Villepin is right. Maybe the working world should be more precarious in your first years. Or maybe that would be a capitalists’ charter, fit to riot against. No wonder Paris is arguing with itself.