Some tell me, “Just wait until the CPE (jobs law) crisis is over to comment on it!” Why wait? The pros and the cons have already lost out on it and are aware of that. They will nevertheless have lived the event like the only sort of adventure the modern man has left, now that a drabber and drabber system confines him in more and more laws.

Photo : Sylvain H. (Wikimedia)

Does the CPE, that new jobs law, brings about jobs insecurity? Is it a condemnation of the labor law, as trade unions warn? If the labor law is ever threatened, demonstrations will be appropriate then. As for the lack of job security, it has long been the result of the shortage of jobs, so that the government shouldn’t be reproached for trying to induce employers to create some non-essential paid jobs, which might well be a plus for their firms, for their customers, for the quality of life. If my plumber had one more workman, I wouldn’t have to wait for a month until my sink U-bend is fixed and meanwhile to empty the bucket under it twice a day. But I know we are faced with a crisis of a much wider scale: We should save the French industry, which has for years been delocalizing and making the French lose long accumulated practical skills and expertness by training far less costly manpower abroad. Industry is not faced with competing plumbers in the neighbourhood, but it is in competition with the world trade dynamics.
Why have the media featured only the anti-CPE youth? Because a newsman does not regard the pro-CPE youth worth a news. These however make up most of French youth. What’s more, a lot of them go as far as to declare: “That jobs law, CPE, may give us the opportunity to prove that we are able to work and bring creative benefits, which could restart and secure the industrial engine, force bosses to review their misgivings about their business…” Why are a great many media inclined to make us think that most of French youth want a sovietized regime, which guarantees jobs and retirement, as if such a regime could never end up in France in the disastrous way it ended up in USSR? As to the trade union rulers, they draw from the CPE an opportunity of restoring their importance long lost, as the five of them represent less than 9% of the paid jobs in France. As to the Left, they forget that they too have brought about riots like the well-famed riot against the law of Allegre, a socialist minister of education under premier Lionel Jospin. It is not talking politics merely to observe those facts and remind that The Sign quite rightly says that Truth is that the world has to change (28/7). Let’s strive to urge men to restore the spiritual intelligence they have long lost (32/5).