Monday, March 27, 2006

French Protests

In France a new labor law was passed, called the First Employment Contract (CPE), that allows business owners to fire an employee without any reason before two years of employment is over if the employee is under the age of 26 . The new law was passed in a slightly devious manner by avoiding a debate on the statute that is, apparently, standard before any regulation issued by the prime minister (Dominique de Villepin) is placed into law.

Large protests and rioting have been taking place throughout France because of the devious manner in which the statute was passed as well as there is strong resentment towards how the law affects youth employment. The main disagreement with the law is that giving an employer the ability to fire someone 26 and under after two years creates a strong bias against long-term employment for youths. Some argue that because of this bias “an employer will have an incentive to end their employment before the two years are up and hire another employee who is under 26.” (from ohmynews.com) This is especially prominent right now because youth unemployment has reached almost 20%, prompting me to wonder: how could Dominique de Villepin have thought that this statute would help lower the youth unemployment rate? Is the idea to give employers more of an incentive to hire younger people because they can easily fire them later? I would think there is a better approach.

Before the CPE was passed businesses could fire an employee with no reason only before one month of employment. It seems to me that two years is a bit exorbitant, though I also believe that an employer should have longer than one month as a trial period for the new employee. Three to six months, with no age restriction, seems at least reasonable to me and any more than that begins to give the employer incentive to continually find new people. I hope France is able to come up with a good alternative to the CPE that can show the rest of the world that strict labor laws, and strong labor unions, can make life more of a life rather than simply an employment history.

I applaud 35 hour work weeks. I love the idea of at least one month of vacation per year. And I truly doubt stipulations such as those would have any negative effect on business in the US.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Yes, unions do end up costing a business more money because employees end up making more and you are also correct that this is causing business to move out of the country into undeveloped countries or countries that have hardly any labor laws. However, many of these massive corporations that are emigrating are making plenty of money in the US and are exploiting workers in other countries by not giving them a fair living based off of the profit they pull in due to these workers. This is not true of all corporations but a lot of them, especially in South East Asia. I am all for globalization in some respects, i.e. giving high-tech jobs to India is fine, as long as it does not hurt the population there, but many companies, and the IMF, WTO, etc. are actually doing more harm to these developing countries than they are doing good. So, yes you are correct: any human being that has the opportunity to better themselves usually will, and the same follows for business, but when the betterment harms others it should be stopped. Labor unions try to give the worker as much power as possible, as I think they should have, and try to protect the average employer from getting screwed by the company. Good examples of such companies that are opposing unions and successfully screwing their employers for profit: well really do I have to list them you can see their logos wherever you look. As for smaller business that gets harmed because labor unions impose too heavy of restrictions on them, I think there should be laws set up safeguarding a company from being forced by unions to give too high of wages or spend too much on benefits.

Andrew said...

So the alternative is what? Let corporations decide what is best for the employee? No, that would obviously end up with sweatshops across the planet. The government could stand up and enforce better conditions for workers but that isn’t really going to happen because then the politicians wouldn’t get the monetary support of big business. So we are left with no alternative, other than a union run by the people to take care of the workers. Of course there are drawbacks to it, and there is an abundance of unnecessary bureaucracy at the confluence of the unions and businesses, but I can’t see an alternative to it (other than democratically run business cooperatives). Right now the unions have failed the people and are pushing too hard on some initiatives that are unrealistic, but I still can’t see an alternative to the idea of unions that will make sure workers have sufficient rights.

Highly skilled people are easily able to find work, such as yourself, but for the newer, less skilled carpenters, struggling to make rent, then I am sure they are happy that a union was around to help them get some work. Of course having a carpenter come in to nail some cedar boards together for you when you could do it in 30 minutes by yourself seems ridiculous, but to them it might be another dollar to help get food in their kid’s mouth. In your case probably not, but you see my point?

I also see your point, however, that multiple unions together are inhibiting efficient work and forcing too strict of regulations on how the business treats employees, which therefore hurts the business, which is no good either. I don’t know of a work around for that though. Possibly stronger legislation could be created to limit the formation of unions as well as set up more laws governing how the unions are able to operate? I really don’t know.

All this is a little off topic though being that in France the protests do not have anything to do with unions but rather the government (my proclivity for unions forced me to throw them into the post–probably just as a superfluous way to spur discussion).