“Precarity” Reaches Old Europe

Why French students are rioting.

By Julia Gronnevet, Campus Progress
Mar 15th, 2006

Editors Note: this piece was originally written at the onset of the riots in France. As of March 24, the riots are still underway.

Anyone who’s spent some time in France will be familiar with the situation: You’re fresh from the train station and trying to get up to the university, but there’s a bus strike and you have to walk. You’re in Paris and you’re headed to the Louvre! Think again — encore une gréve (another strike) shuts down the metro. The striking power of French unionized workers is impressive and frequently annoying.

By definition French students riot, are outraged, protest and occupy their universities (see 1968), and French workers strike to keep their five weeks of annual vacation. So it’s nothing new that over the weekend French students occupied their university in central Paris until it was stormed by riot police. To see the headline “Reform Meets Resistance in Sorbonne Raid” in Saturday’s Washington Post, therefore, was sort of like that old Onion headline “Hotcake sales brisk.”

The contentious issue this time is a new law proposed by French prime minister Dominique de Villepin that essentially introduces American-style at-will employee contracts to French youth. Known as the CPE (“contrat de première embauche” or “first job contract”), employers will be able to fire young employees without giving a reason during the first two years of their employment. M. de Villepin and much of the French right wing believe this measure will reduce unemployment rates that are particularly bad among young workers below the age of 26.

Clearly visible in press pictures from the riots, where students first demonstrated and then occupied the Sorbonne University in central Paris, were banners and placards denouncing precarité . Here’s another photo series. Among the regular features of protest pictures — the singing protesters, the riot police and the wreckage— is the word featured on an upturned desk turned into a barricade.

“Precarity” is “the condition of living without stability or even the assurance of survival” due to the shrinking welfare state and increasingly temporary nature of work. While this kind of work environment has been common in the United States for decades as the power or organized labor has waned, Europeans and South Americans are only just now waking up to the new and harsher work environment they’ll be living in when they try to compete in the global labor market.

But living nowhere in particular, suddenly finding yourself with 17 euros to live on for the next five days, shopping at secondhand stores out of necessity, not quirkiness — is not a cool, new youth movement. Naming the phenomenon and finding some charming elements in it is simply a slightly desperate way of trying to feel a bit better about an increasingly uncertain future. When French students demonstrate against increasing insecurity in the job market, they call it precarity, and with that word instantly communicate to other students around Europe exactly what is wrong with the new job contracts.

After about a year spent in the relentlessly capitalist United States, I’m shocked to find that my initial reaction to these protesting French students was a snort of derision. Work place rights? Paid vacation? A livable minimum wage? What kind of world do these people think they live in? It seemed like a naïve point of view, and too easy to counter with the fact that unemployment rates really are too high and, with that, French workers’ job rights are better than most other peoples’ in the world, the underlying understanding being that they could certainly stand to lose some.

And then it all comes back to me, European that I am — they live in a world where workers’ needs and wishes are legitimate causes. Certainly, unemployment may go down if workers can be hired on short notice. By the same token, business profitability will increase if workers are paid less, if women have no maternity leave and if people feel compelled to work mandatory overtime to safeguard their increasingly precarious jobs. While it may make economic sense to cut workers’ rights, past a certain point becomes perfectly logical but totally insane. A job market where the employee is powerless is not the kind of job market future French employees want. Moreover, it’s not compatible with French society as a whole. (I frequently suspect that this kind of labor market isn’t compatible with American society either because of the rising inequality in American society.)

The fact that young French workers have it better than American minimum wage workers today is all the more reason for them to fight for the rights they’ve accumulated, and it’s only right and proper that employees are part of negotiating the terms on which they’re willing to work.