France : Labour: Labour-law riots follow 2005 'immigrant' youth-riots of Arab, African ethnic France-born minorities
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An annotated chronology of key events in the standoff over French law, AP with extensive intermeshed glosses by refWrite's Politicarp:
• May 31, 2005: French President Jacques Chirac appoints loyalist Dominique de Villepin as prime minister[, in a cabinet reshuffle replacing the previous Raffarin cabinet. De Villepin was previously foreign minister, also under Chirac, and was one of the intransigents to whom US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made is famous "Old Europe" remark. Chirac and his protégé De Villepin are leaders are leaders in the neo-Gaullist party, UMP–l'Union pour la Majorité Presidentielle –which in 2002 first brawt together the Gaullists, most Christian Democrats, most Liberals, most Radicals, most Social Democrats, and many Independents. They were able to outrank the various leftist parties who were disunited and in disarray. But in a surprise, the second ranking party against UMP was the hard right anti-immigrant force of Jean-Marie LePen's Le Front National, the party of far-r+ght French nationalists, including a number of outr+t racists. So, in the runoff election, required because no party won a majority, most leftists swallowed hard and voted for the UMP. Joining the center-right plus reluctant left was the runoff was the rump formation of the unabsorbed Christian Democrats, re-assembled to continue as UDF–l'Union de la Démocratie Français led since 2005 by François Bayrou. "While a partner in the UMP Raffarin cabinet, the UDF sometimes criticized the policies of the French government, yet did not wish to quit the majority coalition and enter the opposition, which is mostly left-wing. As a result, UDF, save for Gilles de Robien, quit the cabinet in the March 31, 2004 cabinet reshuffling, while still remaining in the parliamentary majority. ¶ In 2004, the party, along with Italy's Margherita, was one of the founding members of the European Democratic Party." See also: Christian Democratic parties- P]
• Aug. 2, 2005: Villepin's conservative government approves a hotly contested measure aimed at boosting employment by allowing small firms to fire employees easily within the first two years on a job [bolds are mine - P].
• Oct. 27, 2005: Accidental electrocution deaths of two teens sparks riots in poor [Arab and African ethnic minoritis - P] Paris neighborhoods that spread to major cities. Youths torch thousands of cars and some public buildings. Riots last three weeks. [UMP Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy directs the riot police in containing the furious Arab and African ethnic youth, appearing more and more as the strongman of the UMP government. Sarkozy is a contender to replace Chirac who has given his support to De Villepin instead. Sarkozy has signalled his more open appreciation of the religious factor in French society, culture and daily life; he seems to be less a stickler for la laïcité - the notorious state doctrine of neutrality toward religions, especially in mainstream French schools, which feigned neutrality is itself a state-sponsored religion as well-articulated by the anti-clericalist movement of modern French history. It was in obsessive support of this French political tradition that Chirac banned Muslim girls from wearning headscarfs in these schools. At the same time, France also does support some Christian and Jewish schools (Sarkozy is of Christian and Jewish parentage), such schools are particularly numeorus in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine where both the traditional Reformed and Lutheran communities have state-support for their school systems. Sarkozy has made gestures to these communities thruout France, as well as to the Muslims for an even more open approach; at the same time he ran the police in putting down the 2005 round of riots. - P]
• Jan. 16: Villepin announces a new job law that aims to reduce France's high youth unemployment rate — 23 percent nationwide and as much as twice that in the riot-wracked [Arab and African ethnic minorities - P] poor neighborhoods. It allows employers to fire 18- to 25-year-olds without reason for up to two years after hiring. [The idea is to allow small businesses to hire ethnic-minority youth without work experience, with unknown abilities of adaptation to good work habits, and to provide on the job-training as part of the process of assimilation, but with entry-level wages and a long probationary period with lots of discretionary power to the employers. - P]
• Jan. 31: Student groups and labor unions stage first demonstrations against the new law. Thousands march in Paris and other cities. [France is perhaps the most feather-bedded nation in the world; people look for "a job for life" and when they get it their productivity ebbs, but wages and state-supported benefits do not. Student groups and labour unions have vested interests in maintaining theis arrangementment, so they oppose laws that would allow young little-schooled Arab and African ethnics to enter the workforce and put competitive pressure from small businesses upon the the lower-end of the corporate economy. - P]
• Feb. 9: Villepin pushes the legislation through parliament's lower house by invoking a rarely used rule that allows the majority to bypass floor debate. [Suddenly, this renders the neo-Gaullist leadership of France's welfare state no longer centrist but "conservative," and the socialist sects in the lower-chamber hurl lfet abuse at the desperate government of neo-Gaullist Villepin and his strongman President Chirac. - P]
• March 9: Both houses of parliament give law final approval. [The new "conservatives" win the parliamentary battle. - P]
• March 11: Riot police raid the Sorbonne University, ousting some 200 student protesters. Students shower chairs and ladders onto police officers. [Allow me a bit of rewrite of the preceding AP chronicle item which is rather misleading: Student protestors take over key facilities of the Sorbonne and settle in for an occupation to cripple the university's functioning in order to prevent other students and their professors from normal pursuit of their studies and research. The protestors are part of the sectarian left who see their role as "student" as a segment of Marxism's idea of a wage-slavery proletariat, "workers" who now of have the dreamed-of "labour" issue they need to start the Revolution, according to the most orthodox Marxism still extant. Riot polic under the Interior Minister, Sarkosky, try to prevent the tiny minority of many thousands of Sorbonne students from bringing all study to a halt. - P]
• March 18: At least a half-million people [the nonstudent adult left swells the 200 number of student occupiers, because of the whip-up the French leftwing media unleash, by recruiting members of leftist political parties, radical labour leaders, and the revolution-thrill seekers to join in a - P] march in a nationwide demonstration against the job law. The Paris march ends in violence that leaves one demonstrator in a coma. [Without provoking the violence, a key segment of marxists and anarchists would have failed to produce the desired apocalyptic scenario that must at least hint of the blood that will flow freely in the Revolution. - P0
• March 23: Rioters mixed in with demonstrators turn a park in front of Napoleon's tomb into a battlefield in the most widespread violence linked to the protests. [Now the tension reaches its testosterone-driven climax, and the echoes of Frances's tradition of Revolution play out their chorus in full voice, thus reinvigorating the left in Parliament, the labour unions (there are several and they are not all communist, a few have some economic sense and sensitivity to the the joblessness of the Arab and African ethnic-minority youth who stand to benefit from the new law). The police under Interior Minister Sakrkozy pick up the slack produced by Villepin's new labour scheme. The two neo-Gaullists are the leading contenders to head the UMP party and take the place of Chirac in the next election. - P]
• March 24: Villepin and union leaders hold their first talks on the law. No breakthrough. [Intransigence on both sides, as the dandy Villepin realizes that there's little solution to the problem of the unassimilated ethinic youth without creating employment favbourable to small businesses willing to experiment with new faces, people willing to start for low wages, and prove themselves stable employees for the long term - rather, than disappear after the first few paychecks. The strategy has worked in other places. - P]
• March 28: More than 1 million demonstrators pour onto streets. Strikers shut down Eiffel Tower, disrupt train, plane, subway and bus services. [The fury of the featherbedding segment of French society is at its h+watermark. - P.]
• March 30: France's Constitutional Council rules that contract is constitutional. [The juridic tradition of the nation is consulted, and the jurisprudence of the courts confirmed in the direction of backing the new labour law wholeheartedly as court cases would arise following its enactment and enforcement. Since the ideologistis of the left apparently were contesting in their opinion pieces in Libération (NewLeft mass daily, print and online) and L'humanité (survivor of the Communist-renaming, a hardline newspaper) the very concept of contract and the variablity of terms of employment which a given employer mite insist upon; this inmportant re-affirmation by the Constitutional Council was one without which French business would falter and a thoro economic depression probably ensue, even tho the actual jurisprudential issues raised by the new law applied only to small businesses. - p].
• March 31: Chirac says he will enact the law but seek to modify it. [It therefore remains to be seen whether Chirac will back down while trying to save face from himself and his party, or whether instead he will improve some of the details of the legislation but hold the line. The latter is important, because at present it is the only tool at hand for the neo-Gaullists to preserve private eneterprise and solve the problem of the gross underployment of the jobless working-age youth of the Arab and African ethnic minorities. - P]
With thanks to the unsigned Associated Press complilers of the chrnology. - Politicarp
Don't forget to read refWrite...page 2.
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