France in revolt. Some comparisons.

Two months of French protests escalated over the past week as unions targeted the sensitive oil industry, blocking fuel depots and refineries. Workers in the big majority of power stations have voted to join the action.

In squares across France students and other young people have been protesting against the Socialist Party's proposed attack on labour rights. Bypassing the French Assembly, Socialist Party President Hollande, is trying to force French workers to give up rights won over decades. Now key sectors of workers have moved to break the new Bill. In a sad reflection of the Syriza leadership in Greece, who have just taken the strongest programme of cuts through the Greek Parliament so far imposed by the Troika, another traditionally left regime is relaunching an anti-working class initiative which its traditional right wing predecessors could not win.

The banner under which Hollande has launched his battle is 'an end to France's long term unemployment of 10% and 24% for youth.' It is French worker's rights of pay and conditions which Hollande proposes to remove in order to get France back to work! And the UK (according to Chancellor Osborne and Prime Minister Cameron) could be the example to follow here. UK unemployment is 5% and youth unemployment 'only' 18% (See Statistica Feb. 2016.)

Some of the obstacles that Hollande would like to dismantle are those legal rights that apply in France to Temporary Employment. In France all temporary contracts must have a definite start and end date. Equal treatment with full time workers is obligatory, temporary contracts can only be used in a few statutory defined conditions, they can only be renewed once, they are no longer than 18 months, full pay for the contract must be paid in the event of an early termination, there is severance pay of between 6 and 10% at the end of the contract, and unemployment benefits are linked to previous earnings. Not surprisingly perhaps, temporary contracts in France lead to 8 out of 10 being recruited to full time positions. (Personnel Today, March 2015, Guardian, Oct 2014.) And in general the French still work on average five fewer hours a week than the Brits!

In France there are 500 thousand Agency workers. Nearly a million in the UK. There are 4.2 million in part time employment in France and over 8 million in the UK. Perhaps it is this sort of 'flexibility, that needs expanding in France to increase employment? And the secret weapon in the UK's arsenal when it comes to reducing unemployment, particularly youth unemployment - leave aside young peoples' benefits reductions - are the UK's Zero Hour Contracts! In France such contracts are currently illegal.

There are 800 thousand people in the UK 'on' zero hour contracts - 2.5% of all workers - up by 19% this year and climbing. Zero hour contracts are 'offered' (in an 'I'll make you an offer you can't refuse' sort of way) to a quarter of all UK unemployed. They average 26 paid hours a week. (ONS March 2016.) In fact in general in the UK there has been a 53% increase in part time and temporary work of all kinds between 1984 and 2012, with young people twice as likely as all employees to 'benefit' from this sort of work. And just in case you might think that Britain is still a nation of small shopkeepers, Public Administration, Education and Health account for two fifths of this work while Distribution, Hotels and Restaurants cover one fifth. (ONS 2012.)

So here then is the answer to Holland's woes?

Except it does not make sense - even in its own terms. Hollande wants to 'deal' with long term seemingly irreducible unemployment - a feature of capitalist societies since their dawn - by reducing the cost of labour. This is of course the main point of a 'reserve army of unemployed'. But even the most short sighted scrutineer of the UK's answer to long term unemployment in general, and youth unemployment in particular, must agree that its solution is considerably worse than the problem it seeks to fix.

There is another way to compare 'work' and 'unemployment' between the two countries. First, the string of measures put in place by Blair and the subsequent regimes in the UK, to create more and more 'flexible' labour, have created an emerging catastrophe. Today labour productivity, the amount of value produced in one hour of work, is 31% lower than in France. The UK's productivity is the lowest of the G7 countries and it has the biggest gap with its leading competitors since modern productivity measures began. (Guardian, Feb 2016.) Second, soaking up any sort of labour, without rights and at pitiful prices, by punitive measures and huge cuts in benefits, has further skewed the UK's economy away from production and further into services and finance, where profit is available without much product. Third a 'precarious' workforce cannot buy houses or pay for pensions or for places in care homes or a decent life.

Hollande has another agenda besides removing unemployment pinned to the back of his proposed labour 'reform.'  He believes that he is uniquely fit to assure a more pliant labour movement in France, a movement with its claws cut and its teeth removed. This, he conjectures, would open the road to the European and international investment that he believes France requires, if France's state is to reduce its own role and its increasing need for taxation. But whatever his hackneyed, Thatcherite plan, perhaps the facts are more obvious to the young protestors in France than to Hollande (or the smug fools who lord it in the British Treasury.) And so the apparent paradox, that the young French unemployed are fighting tooth and nail against the Socialist leader's anti-labour law, becomes immediately resolved.