France buried its planned youth labor reforms on Friday in a way that has “Jacques Chirac” written all over it. Chirac, with the demeanor of an undertaker, signed the law that would give employers the right to fire first-time workers under 26 years of age within the first two years of employment.
At the same time, he suspended the application of the law.
With a single act, he thus not only acquiesced in the second largest EU economy remaining mired in a mid-20th-century welfare state. He also knocked the pegs out from under his protégé, the equally unpleasant neo-Bonapartist Villepin, and made sure that his potential successor, free-trade, pro-business advocate Nicholas Sarkozy, will face an uphill battle in the next election.
This in itself is a picture-book example of a lack of principles and political integrity. But it has bigger implications. Because the French electorate is already on record as refusing to adapt to the conditions posed by the competitive environment created by the enlarged EU. Not quite a year ago, they resoundingly rejected passing a EU constitution. Last month’s retrograde labor disputes and the accompanying general strike exceed the usual French insanity by a solid margin.
Based on the populist rejection of competition in a global environment, the next French government may well turn out to be a throwback to the socialist welfare state that has already left the French economy in shambles. This is a fundamentally bearish factor for the future of the European Union and its single currency, the euro.
With the pictures and videos of French youth rioting for a static work environment in mind, the contrast couldn’t have been greater: Last Saturday, my oldest son’s Boy Scout troop could be found doing the leg, back, and arm work of their recent “Mulch Sale Fundraiser.”
It sounded innocuous enough. But I wasn’t prepared for the view as I pulled into the mall parking lot that served as our staging ground. There it was, pallet after pallet, each seven feet high, four dozen fifty-pound bags to the pallet… over 11,000 bags in all.
A veritable Chinese Wall of double-shredded hardwood mulch. In between a small front-loader and a forklift, operated by two fathers, loading six box trucks and a flotilla of pickup trucks, forty boys in various stages of soiled clothes were navigating and piloting deliveries all over town, loading and unloading trucks, schlepping one, two, four mulch bags at a time to pile them neatly in driveways and back yards.
I drove a “chase car” with four high school boys. And I have to admit that I have never seen a group of boys their age work in a more focused, determined fashion. The chatter inside the car died down after the first load - six pallets - had been delivered, and yet there was no shirking or laziness even after the fourth load.
There was one moment that made me especially proud: When the father who had my own son attached to his truck told me that he was impressed by how hard the boy was working. Good to know he can rise to a challenge when it counts.
If these boys represent the future of America, I know whom I put my money on!
J. Christoph Amberger
Executive Publisher and
The Taipan Group’s 247-profits e-Dispatch Team
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