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Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
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 Strike
Of The Absurd
Workers of France, unite!
[Ralph
Peters] 3/30/06
Dakar,
Senegal - In solidarity with protesting students from
elite universities, French labor unions decreed a national
celebration of self-righteous sloth - known elsewhere as
a general strike.
Workers of
France, unite! You have nothing to lose but your competitive
edge.
Why have
the students been demonstrating? Because their government proposed
that young workers should not automatically be granted a (short)
lifetime of job security from the first day they're hired.
Under the proposed reform, the first two years of employment
would be a probationary period (under siege, the government
offered to compromise at one year).
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The regime's
hope is that employers might be more willing to take a chance
on hiring more young workers if they aren't automatically condemned
to keep even the most inept or lazy workers on the payroll
- and on their tax rolls.
Reasonable? Mais
non, Monsieur le Anglo-Saxon Capitalist Cochon! The
burdern must be on the employer to pay, not on the worker
to work!
French Prime
Minister Dominique de Villepin is hardly a sympathetic figure,
yet this time around he's right. It's essential for France
to create more jobs - especially for the blue-collar youths
and the slum-dwellers who rioted out of hopelessness last autumn.
By American
standards, the minor reforms proposed seem common-sensical.
But common sense has fled the land of Cartesian rationalism.
To gratify the world's most-spoiled workers, employers must
be treated as bridegrooms forced to marry blindly and for whom
the cost of divorce is exhorbitant. And, of course, striking
is the French national sport.
But consider
who's doing the striking: Workers who already have tenure,
plus fashionably left-wing students. Those students ultimately
will get their degrees and they'll either find jobs at home
or have the credentials to migrate - to that nasty Anglo-Saxon
capital, London, if they can't get work visas to the United
States.
French students
from elite schools can protest and riot all they want. For
them, there are no consequences.
It's different
for the blue- collar kids. In la belle France, once you leave
the Disneyworlds of central Paris or Provence, a quarter of
the young are unemployed (the rate's almost 50 percent among
those whose skin isn't white).
As for those "progressive" French
labor unions, they're not interested in creating new jobs in
a changing world or in fostering competitive skills. They just
want to protect the unaffordably lavish benefits their current
members enjoy.
The strikes
and demonstrations aren't about justice. They're about shameless
selfishness.
Perhaps we
should send a thank-you bouquet to the French strikers for
making the English-speaking world look even more attractive
to investors than it already did: The French strike, we work.
Guess who wins the economic sweepstates. And guess who says
the mean world isn't fair.
The French
(and their neighbors in Old Europe) enjoyed a golden half-century
living off the fat of the land. Now the bones are showing.
For all of the worries about our own Social Security system,
it looks as robust as a regiment of super-heroes compared to
the European government pension funds plummeting toward bankruptcy
today.
It's true,
folks: There ain't no free lunch. Aging populations suffering
from depression-level unemployment rates can't survive if those
with jobs demand 35-hour work-weeks, a couple of months' vacation
and lavish benefits upon an early retirement. Oh, and 100 percent
job security.
The results?
French industy is staggering, research is torpid, French investment
funds are fleeing offshore and new ideas hardly have a chance.
Think GM's
got problems in the showroom? Any of you want to buy a Renault?
France is
headed for severe difficulties (and long before a Muslim majority
rips out the vineyards of Chateau Margaux). Unfortunately,
we need to worry, too.
Quarrels
aside, a prosperous, competitive Europe would be good for us
and good for the global economy. A continent in spiteful decline
threatens to generate enough trouble for internal consumption
and wide export, too.
Europe's
failures have cost us dearly enough in the past. We shouldn't
be caught off-guard a third time because we think that "everything
has changed."
Europe hasn't
even changed its underwear, let alone its political morality.
Here in West
Africa - where the French still loot the local wealth today
- the people would line up by the millions for any jobs at
all. And they wouldn't expect to keep those jobs if they didn't
work. Their relatives in the slums of France would love a chance
at even the most-meager entry-level jobs. (The people in francophone
Africa speak of the job opportunities in New York City as other
people speak of eternal paradise.)
But in France
the dogma of theoretical rights trumps the true "Rights
of Man." The strikers and univeristy brats in France constitute
an economic al Qaeda. They're intolerant, reactionary fundamentalists
and rigid opponents of globalization (that Anglo-Saxon conspiracy).
They prefer an illusory heaven to an improved reality.
The strikers
and protesters in the streets of France aren't defending the
Have-nots. They represent the tyranny of the Haves. For now. ONE
Ralph Peters'
latest book is New
Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2006 - NY Post
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