For Once - I agree with the French Government from Planck's Constant

French riot police clashed with demonstrators protesting the First Employment Contract (CPE). Organizers claimed that some 300,000 protested in Paris Saturday afternoon and a million in more than 150 demonstrations nationwide after demonstrations on Thursday drawing up to half a million university and high-school students.

The government wants to let firms offer job contracts to people under 26 which would make it easier for them to be fired at short notice. 70% of the French want it to be withdrawn.

This is one time I agree with the French government. France has one of Europe's highest youth unemployment rates, with 23 percent of the country's young adults out of work and about 40 percent in some of the poor high-immigration city suburbs jobless. One of the reasons for this is that employers are loath to hire anyone new for fear of hiring an idiot that they wouldn't be able to get rid of for the next 45 years.

Although students and workers think that this new law is against their best interests, this happens to be the best thing for them in the long run. Once this is passed, we will see an explosion of hiring across France.

As to who is fueling the demonstrations: according to Polish central bank Governor Leszek Balcerowicz , Anti-market rhetoric from French elites is partly to blame for the violent protests against reform that are wracking the country. "I think in France, most of the elite engage in anti-market propaganda for their short-term political purposes," he said at the 61st International Atlantic Economic Conference in Berlin. "If you bombard the public with this message, which is derived from Marxism...then we should not be surprised" when there is public resistance to change, he added.

So how hard is it really to get rid of an employee in France?

Triplet & Associés, French Employment Law: Dismissing Employees in France
Whilst this list should not be held to be exhaustive, the following points might be of particular comparative interest to practitioners used to the quite different provisions of many Common Law systems.

Employment in France is not 'at will' and thus dismissals may only come about on demonstrably and limited objective grounds, which must be brought to the attention of the employee in writing.

Dismissals are subject to stringent, and often bureaucratic, procedural statutory constraints.

Redundancies, or lay-offs on economic grounds, are subject to separate and complex procedural and substantive constraints particularly in the case of multiple dismissals.

There are a number of French State Agencies which have a statutory right to be advised of, and in some cases to authorise, proposed dismissals by private sector employers.

It is extremely easy and at virtually no cost for an employee to start litigation against his (ex) employer before separate Labour Courts.

Labour Relations Courts (Conseils de Prud'hommes) are generally made up of lay judges who are elected from the ranks of employer/employee organisations.

It is rare that the plaintiff be other than an employee and just as rare that claims be dismissed with no award whatsoever being made against the employer.

Around 500,000 people demonstrate in Paris, as part of a nationwide day of strikes and protests to call for the complete abrogation of the unpopular First Employment Contract (CPE). Gangs of youths clashed with riot police who responded with tear gas as violence erupted in Paris and other French cities after more than a million people protested against an unpopular youth jobs plan.

Flickr User:mtsawyer

Basically, a private employer getting rid of a slacker or anyone else is akin to trying to get rid of an American civil servant, which unless one is caught in a kiddie-porn film with embezzled funds over a dead body with incontrovertible DNA evidence and a signed, taped confession, is nigh impossible.

Here's a telling quote from smh.com: "They're offering us nothing but slavery," said Maud Pottier, 17, a student at Jules Verne High School in Sartrouville, north of Paris. "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."

Wow, imagine that! Having a job means doing whatever the employer requires. Who ever heard of such abusive treatment? What next? Coming in on time?

Some additional perspective from stuck-on-stupid: It takes four people in France to do the same work easily accomplished by three workers in the United States and the gap is widening. Worse still, France’s overall unemployment rate is double that in the US.

For more on spoiled French youth read Jonah Goldberg's Viva la Sloth.