France Should Not Follow America's Example on Labor

Is there some connection between immigration protests in the United States and the recent labor reform protests and rioting taking place on the streets of France? According to this op-ed article from Mexico's La Jornada, France's decrepit leadership is looking for labor solutions that have resulted in America's current crisis, which is characterized by a job market with little or no protection for workers, and a State that has no conception of its obligations.

By Ilán Semo

Translated By Paula van de Werken

April 8, 2006

Mexico - La Jornada - Original Article (Spanish)

What can French students, who are demanding the resignation of President Jacques Chirac, have in common with the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, who, in the streets of Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, are calling for the right to step out of the shadows of illegality? The Economist, Foreign Affairs and Newsweek all express alarm on their covers, over a social explosion that no one saw coming. And they all share the same amazement and express it in the same manner.

It seems that in the streets of Paris, something more than the destiny of an employment law is in play. In this new wave of anger, the editors of the three publications seem to suggest, the entire future of France is unraveling. (As though it were a mantra, this phrase appeared word for word in all three publications, as if they made a pact to predict a catastrophe.) For their part, [French publications] L'Express, Nouvel Observateur and Signe answer them, with the same dose of evident agitation in regard to the United States: a Mexican flag with the Statue of Liberty in the background, ironically portraying "the future of the United States."

The future, one presumes, is something rather serious, above all when it has to do with the destiny of an entire nation. Perhaps they are all closer to the truth than they would want to be.

That the perception of the future of a whole country depends on a "labor law" (and not the "stock market" "capital investment" "interest rates" and all those other familiar quasi-magical phrases that are part of the semantics of economics) is at once ironic and also a warning. (Chirac's government has proposed to modify, or better said, to cancel the very old French and European right to job security for young people between the ages of 20 and 26 years of age). It is certainly not routine to suspect that the legitimacy of an entire economic philosophy is at risk, even at such a critical moment.

Finally, the law proposed by [French Prime Minister] Dominique de De Villepin seeks to plunge a country, which has up to now maintained a social contract, directly into the morality of the market. That is to say, it would plunge future university graduates into conditions similar to those which are endured (by deed if not by word) by the inhabitants of the suburbs (the new "belts" of French poverty), who, just months ago, set fire, literally, to thousands of cars and part of an auto factory to allow themselves to be heard.

Will [the Parisian suburb of] Nanterre now also become a poor neighborhood? A parking lot for the unemployed? This is the future, without a doubt.

There is much political irresponsibility and even more economic inefficiency within the framework of France's labor reforms. The political class that has governed France since the fall of Charles de Gaulle in 1968 seem convinced that the solution to the productivity problem (or better said, its non-productivity problem) is to be found by reducing the work force to a condition which seems more like the Third World every day. It is a conviction, let us say, of class, or of the old regime. To be sure, they have studied the American example.

Since the end of the 1970s, America's borders have become ever more porous, allowing a massive migration of illegal workers (mostly Latinos, and above all, Mexicans). In these remote border areas, the law simply stopped being applied. In only two decades, between 13 and 15 million undocumented workers have transformed the productivity-landscape of the giant.

Europe brought in immigrants for similar reasons. The difference is that they were "invited," as in Germany, or they rapidly acquired citizenship, as in France. The United States made itself into a unique hinterland for its migratory workforce, in that it paid it a quarter of the normal wage, guaranteed no civil or human rights, and with a government that has no conception of its obligations. California, for example, became the world's sixth-largest economy, thanks to this conjunction of the highest technologies and the most sub-human working conditions.

Now the elite French want this same treachery inserted into their industrial and technological institutions.

But it's too late. The protests in Paris and Los Angeles are the first powerful signs of the bankruptcy of arguments based on the irrevocable rationality of the market, among the countless migrants without the tools to be part of it. All the arrogant pride of the 1990s has now turned to pessimism.

The United States is facing the most unpredictable challenge in its entire history of immigration: to find a solution to a migrant identity problem which at its root pertains to America's national identity. It has quickly turned into the biggest political crisis that the current Administration has ever had to face. The Republican Party is divided, and the White House has lost the majority which has up to now allowed it to continue with its Iraq adventure.

And in the context of the great powers, no one with five functioning senses believes that France has any future under its current political class. It would be better to speak of the France of the future. Some of that is currently playing out in today's angry streets of Paris.