IS THERE HOPE FOR FRANCE?

Hopeful thoughts about France's national strikes
(Matt Welch, June 12 2003, Reason)

For those who have come to view France as the harbinger of a second Holocaust or the Islamic Republic of France, it is tempting to interpret this latest round of unionista chaos as the first stages of a violent revolution. But one does not need be a frog-loving Fifth Columnist to see a few bright sides to this depressingly familiar story.

First, is the existence of the reform proposal itself. Unlike some other countries you could name, France has recognized that its low rate of childbirth will cause its pay-as-you-go retirement system to go bankrupt if not reformed, and quick. Center-right Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a former government minister in charge of small business, wants to increase the amount of time state employees must work before receiving full retirement benefits from 37.5 years to 40 years, putting them on equal footing with private-sector workers by 2008. In 2012, that would be bumped up to 41 years; by 2020 it would be 42.

This sends a welcome message to France's umpteen million fonctionnaires: why the hell should people always be encouraged to work for the state? As it stands, college graduates have responded to decades of double-digit youth unemployment by fighting like wolverines for safe positions as teachers, librarians, and the like. The resulting bloat and societal schism has meant that people still talk about "the private sector" as if it's an exotic and slightly dangerous foreign country (as in, "Jean-Marc isn't showing much solidarity with the strikers." "Yeah, well, that's because he works in the private sector.")

Raffarin's common-sense proposal, as UPI points out, is being spurred on by the European Union. (Yes, that same famously bureaucratic body that has forced France to privatize state industries, allow more foreign competition and investment, open its borders, and adhere to something approaching fiscal discipline.) He has also been carefully laying the political groundwork for reform since coming to power last May, reports the Guardian's Jon Henley.

Another reason to be optimistic is that the population appears, at long last, to be getting at least slightly annoyed with the nonstop confrontation and inconvenience. Eight years ago, there was enormous popular support for a series of national strikes against the center-right government of Alain Juppe, who tried to ram through a similar pension proposal (plus other austerity measures) and was promptly booted out of office. "Striking workers from the state railway SNCF," writes Henley, "have said they no longer dare wear their uniform to go to rallies because of the insults it attracts, and one poll published yesterday suggested only 52 percent of the public backed the protest, against 66 percent a couple of weeks ago."

The French have had a dysfunctional society and government for centuries past (for an example read the account of the Mississippi banking scandal written in Charles Francis Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and compare that to the one regarding the South Sea bubble crisis which occurred in England) but who knows? Maybe this is the first tentative step away from the abyss. Posted by M Ali Choudhury at June 13, 2003 5:54 PM