French Universities occupied
papidan | 18.03.2006 22:28 | Education | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements
Protests against “slave” contracts of employment
On 16 March, 64 French universities, out of 84, were on strike.
This huge movement of young people started in January. Why?
On 16 March, 64 French universities, out of 84, were on strike.
This huge movement of young people started in January. Why?
The French government, and its prime minister Dominique de Villepin, have imposed a new act: the “Loi sur l’égalité des chances” (Equal Opportunities Act!!).
The law was passed in a way that sidestepped the debate and discussion that is a traditional part of the legislative process in France, a special procedure known as Article 49.3 of the French Constitution.
This law:
- creates a “parental responsibility contract” (your children don’t go to school regularly, well, pay a fine and say goodbye to your family allowances),
- lower the legal compulsory age of school (16 to 14) to allow 14 years old teenagers to become apprentice,
- allows night-work for 15 years old teenagers.
- creates different shit working contracts. One of them is called CPE (Contrat Première Embauche, or First Employment Contract).
Contracts of employment
To understand the CPE, you have to know that in France there is legally speaking (not in the real world obviously...) two main contracts of employment: the CDI (contract with no specified end date) and CDD (contract with a specified end date).
Under French law, the employer has usually only one to three months (probationary period) to terminate the employment of a new employee without having to provide a reason. After that, French labor law provides protection for the employee so that employment isn’t ended without objective cause.
The CPE applies to those under 26 years of age who find a new job. It gives the employer the right to terminate the new hire’s employment within TWO YEARS without having to give any reason. For two years, every morning, you don’t know if you will still have the job the next day.
Last August a similar law was put into effect that applied only to employers with less than 20 paid employees. There are many instances of workers protesting they lost their jobs unfairly under this law: they were late for 5 minutes, pregnant, or they claimed their money for overtime...
Those contracts bring us back to the situation existing before 1973 when lay-offs did not have to be justified.
Insecure work, insecure life
The unemployment rate in France is an estimated 10 percent of the French population. This includes at least 20 percent of young people who do not have jobs. Needless to say that it is impossible, for example, to find an appartment with shit working contracts as the CPE/CNE.
You have probably heard about riots in France last November, spearheaded by young workers in the poor suburbs. Everything is connected. Because young people and people in the suburbs generally are the first to suffer from these types of policies.
Because they – and we – know that for governments and companies we are nothing, we are simply dust, the kind you brush away and only notice in order to get rid of.
Because we know that unemployment and insecure jobs are powerful tools to control us, to force us to accept shit jobs, low incomes and bad working conditions. You don’t want this job? Fair enough, there is a reserve army waiting for your position, with even lower wages! Even stable jobs are insecure, because we are so afraid of loosing them (and join women and men in this reserve army of labour), because the only idea of happiness we have learned is getting a big car and TV, expensive clothes, and for that we have to pay our bills and our debts.
A student movement
At the moment, the movement is limited to students and is supported by some trade unions. Some people argue for a practical coming together of this movement and the movement of people involved in the riots few months ago. We can only hope this will happen.
French students are organised in a National Coordination which meets every one or two weeks in a different university. At its last meeting, in Poitiers on 11 March, more than 250 delegates attended from over 60 education institutions (universities and others). As with previous coordinations, they demanded the abolition of CPE, the whole “Equal Opportunities Act”, and the CNE as well!
Recently, the Coordination of the University Heads asked the governement a 6 months delay for the implementation of the CPE. They pretend this is for negociation with young people organisations. But everyone knows this is only to report the implementation until summer hollydays, to break the movement. The right wing governement is of course saying that they will never withdraw this act, but people know that the left wing, pretending to support the struggle, will impose exactly the same type of shit contract as soon as they will be in charge, as they have always done.
Universities are on strike and are closed. Days of actions alternate with days of marches and protests. As in 1968, the Sorbonne University in Paris was occupied, but the CRS (“anti-riot” police) kicked them out. This was merely symbolic, and plenty of universities are still occupied. In Paris, during the last weeks, incredible spontaneous protests gathered between 2000 and 4000 people. This Saturday, 18 march, there has been again huge demonstrations in the whole country (1 500 000 people).
As it was with the last november riots, people are fighting together, people feel they are breathing, they communicate, they are doing something for themselves.
Papidan, a former french student now in London
If you have any comments, contact me.
papidan@no-log.org
To follow, in english, what is happening in France, see the very up-to-date websites
http://libcom.org/blog/
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/03/335653.shtml
For more informations (in french)
http://www.stopcpe.net/cpe/
http://coordination.no-ip.org/
http://paris.indymedia.org/
The law was passed in a way that sidestepped the debate and discussion that is a traditional part of the legislative process in France, a special procedure known as Article 49.3 of the French Constitution.
This law:
- creates a “parental responsibility contract” (your children don’t go to school regularly, well, pay a fine and say goodbye to your family allowances),
- lower the legal compulsory age of school (16 to 14) to allow 14 years old teenagers to become apprentice,
- allows night-work for 15 years old teenagers.
- creates different shit working contracts. One of them is called CPE (Contrat Première Embauche, or First Employment Contract).
Contracts of employment
To understand the CPE, you have to know that in France there is legally speaking (not in the real world obviously...) two main contracts of employment: the CDI (contract with no specified end date) and CDD (contract with a specified end date).
Under French law, the employer has usually only one to three months (probationary period) to terminate the employment of a new employee without having to provide a reason. After that, French labor law provides protection for the employee so that employment isn’t ended without objective cause.
The CPE applies to those under 26 years of age who find a new job. It gives the employer the right to terminate the new hire’s employment within TWO YEARS without having to give any reason. For two years, every morning, you don’t know if you will still have the job the next day.
Last August a similar law was put into effect that applied only to employers with less than 20 paid employees. There are many instances of workers protesting they lost their jobs unfairly under this law: they were late for 5 minutes, pregnant, or they claimed their money for overtime...
Those contracts bring us back to the situation existing before 1973 when lay-offs did not have to be justified.
Insecure work, insecure life
The unemployment rate in France is an estimated 10 percent of the French population. This includes at least 20 percent of young people who do not have jobs. Needless to say that it is impossible, for example, to find an appartment with shit working contracts as the CPE/CNE.
You have probably heard about riots in France last November, spearheaded by young workers in the poor suburbs. Everything is connected. Because young people and people in the suburbs generally are the first to suffer from these types of policies.
Because they – and we – know that for governments and companies we are nothing, we are simply dust, the kind you brush away and only notice in order to get rid of.
Because we know that unemployment and insecure jobs are powerful tools to control us, to force us to accept shit jobs, low incomes and bad working conditions. You don’t want this job? Fair enough, there is a reserve army waiting for your position, with even lower wages! Even stable jobs are insecure, because we are so afraid of loosing them (and join women and men in this reserve army of labour), because the only idea of happiness we have learned is getting a big car and TV, expensive clothes, and for that we have to pay our bills and our debts.
A student movement
At the moment, the movement is limited to students and is supported by some trade unions. Some people argue for a practical coming together of this movement and the movement of people involved in the riots few months ago. We can only hope this will happen.
French students are organised in a National Coordination which meets every one or two weeks in a different university. At its last meeting, in Poitiers on 11 March, more than 250 delegates attended from over 60 education institutions (universities and others). As with previous coordinations, they demanded the abolition of CPE, the whole “Equal Opportunities Act”, and the CNE as well!
Recently, the Coordination of the University Heads asked the governement a 6 months delay for the implementation of the CPE. They pretend this is for negociation with young people organisations. But everyone knows this is only to report the implementation until summer hollydays, to break the movement. The right wing governement is of course saying that they will never withdraw this act, but people know that the left wing, pretending to support the struggle, will impose exactly the same type of shit contract as soon as they will be in charge, as they have always done.
Universities are on strike and are closed. Days of actions alternate with days of marches and protests. As in 1968, the Sorbonne University in Paris was occupied, but the CRS (“anti-riot” police) kicked them out. This was merely symbolic, and plenty of universities are still occupied. In Paris, during the last weeks, incredible spontaneous protests gathered between 2000 and 4000 people. This Saturday, 18 march, there has been again huge demonstrations in the whole country (1 500 000 people).
As it was with the last november riots, people are fighting together, people feel they are breathing, they communicate, they are doing something for themselves.
Papidan, a former french student now in London
If you have any comments, contact me.
papidan@no-log.org To follow, in english, what is happening in France, see the very up-to-date websites
http://libcom.org/blog/ http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/03/335653.shtml For more informations (in french)
http://www.stopcpe.net/cpe/ http://coordination.no-ip.org/ http://paris.indymedia.org/
papidan
e-mail:
papidan@no-log.org
Comments
Hide the following 3 comments
We go to make it happen in England
19.03.2006 03:32
LET FREEDOM RING!
Gary24
already on the newswire a few days ago
19.03.2006 10:09
already on the newswire a few days ago
Creches suffer in French riots
19.03.2006 14:53
Some riot-hit nurseries have had to disperse their babies
Dolls were being evacuated from the creche in Fives, a rundown district of Lille near France's Belgian border, the day after a petrol bomb burnt out the empty sleeping area and scorched activity rooms.
Little remained of the public nursery school in Acheres, west of Paris, other than the snapshots of toddlers stuck to a wall after fire brought down a roof and devoured rooms in the night.
When a blazing car was rammed up against the nursery in Mirail, in the southern city of Toulouse, the rioters did more than trash a building - they shattered a small community.
The loss of a familiar environment with its toys, drawings and plants traumatised the children, one teacher told a community web forum.
"We are going to be split up around several nurseries, brothers and sisters are going to be separated and parents will have to change their travel arrangements," she said.
Few would suggest the attacks on pre-school facilities are co-ordinated - at most they may be "copycat" attacks. But what is clear is that the wide-scale targeting of such places is something quite new.
"It is exceptional to have public spaces devastated like this," Philippe Niemec, secretary general of French teachers' union SE-UNSA, said.
Creches and nurseries on the housing estates are designed to play a role in allowing mothers to pursue careers.
The simplest explanation why rioters, many of them juveniles, attacked creches and schools is that they could.
"It's not the school as such being targeted by the arsonists but the fact that it is simply a public space easier to hit than a station, a cinema or a museum," Mr Niemec says.
Creches and nurseries are even more vulnerable because they are located closer to the heart of their districts.
And because they contain fewer computers and audio-visual aids, they enjoy less protection.
The tragedy is that such facilities are highly appreciated by their immediate communities, as Mr Niemec and others testify.
FRENCH CHILDCARE
Public creches from age 3 months are means-tested; private creches also exist
"Creches familiales" are day centres where child-carers collect babies
Public nurseries are free from 3 to 6 years
Municipal creches, which take on babies from the age of three months, are free of charge for those on the lowest of incomes.
Nursery schools are free to all children from the age of three, and sometimes younger.
According to an open letter from the mayor of Fleury-Merogis, a town south of Paris, when its "creche familiale" was burnt down, numerous families lost an "asset acquired with difficulty".
Staff were shocked to see "all their work go up in smoke", the mayor's office told the BBC News website.
The Mirail teacher said her nursery had "functioned well, seeking to help children of all cultures and religions from an early age" while their parents "slaved away to give their families a chance".
Schools take the blame
Like the Toulouse toddlers, children in Fives were relocated to other nurseries while the city of Lille set about the task of rebuilding.
Francois Rousseau, a city press officer, said that, despite the attacks, community relations in Lille were much better than in the suburbs around Paris, for example.
District mayors went out at night to talk to the rioters and, largely thanks to this dialogue, the city escaped the kind of clashes with police seen elsewhere.
Yet a nursery was burnt and two schools damaged by the rioters.
According to Philippe Niemec, many children with immigrant roots do badly at school or lose faith in education because it is failing in its mission "as a privileged place of social integration".
The lead article on a web forum run by Le Monde newspaper suggests that a "Good" leaving certificate from a ghetto school is worth less in the eyes of French society than a "Pass" certificate from a school outside, though students at both sit the same national exams and their papers are marked anonymously.
The fundamental problem, Mr Niemec says, is the difficulty young people from the housing estates face in getting their first job.
When the social elevator gets stuck, it seems, there will be some ready to vandalise it.
another view