24 March 2006TomPaine.common senseAnya Kamenetz
The current youth uprising in France has caught international observers off guard. The country is now under threat of a general strike on March 28. Over a million students and workers marched on March 18 and 19, not just against a discriminatory law—Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's new "First Employment Contract" would make it easier to fire workers under 26 during their first two years on the job—but against a society that seems to have no place for them.
"What the student demonstrations are saying is that the young refuse to live in the world as it is," the head of France's main student association told a South African paper.The youth unemployment rate in France is 22 percent.
Even the country's most educated children are finding little but unpaid internships or temporary jobs, to say nothing of the despair plaguing young immigrants in urban neighborhoods where unemployment has been clocked at 40 percent.
In the irony of all ironies, this new policy was introduced as a direct reaction to the riots and torched cars of last fall; and yet the fire this time is coming from the middle class as much as the poor.
Yet amid the debates about market forces, Muslim integration into Europe and the barricades of '68, no one seems to be asking the most important question: Will increased labor flexibility actually improve youth employment? The numbers suggest not.
We have a name for the French phenomenon here in the United States: Generation Debt. Nearly every developed country has sky-high youth unemployment rates relative to the general population, and it is always working class youth and ethnic minorities who bear the brunt of the problem. According to Eurostat, France's youth unemployment rate is a little over twice the 9.5 percent general unemployment rate.
In the United States, the unemployment rate for the general population was a low 5 percent in July 2005, but for people in the labor force aged 16-24, the rate was also more than twice as high: 11 percent. For young black men, it was twice as high again: 23.5 percent.
It could not be an overabundance of restrictions on employers in the United States that produces the high youth unemployment rate. We have the most "flexible" labor market in the West, including a historically record-low minimum wage, a prevalence of temporary and part-time jobs and no mandatory employer benefits such as health care. We haven't officially made it easier to fire young people, but it's already just about as easy as it could be. And still young people lag behind in finding work.
The single problem that can be found in all these countries? Youth dislocation as the result of rapid social change. Educational requirements for many jobs have increased, technology moves faster, competition is global, a large baby-boom generation is living longer and healthier and staying at their posts and the old employer-employee lifetime contract is weakening just about everywhere. Thus, young people are facing many a slip 'twixt school and work—what German sociologist Andreas Walther calls "
