Job Incurity and the Welfare State in a Globalized World
【1】On April 10, 2006, French President Jacques Chirac surrendered to public pressure and withdrew the First Employment Contract (known as the CPE – the Contrat Première Embauche in French) after days of protests by student groups and labor unions.装饰管理 The propod law, which was designed to combat France’s 22.2 percent youth unemployment rate, would have allowed firms the freedom to hire workers under the age of 26 on a trial basis for the first two years, during which period employers could also fire such workers more easily than current laws permit.
【2】The government believed that France’s complex and inflexible labor laws – a high minimum wage, high payroll taxes, generous benefits, and an 意大利螺旋面onerous何足挂齿意思 labor code, all enshrined in many different contracts and numerous collective bargaining agreements; rved as a disincentive to hiring young, untested workers. A previous incarnation of the law, the New Employment Contract, applied similar provisions to small business with fewer than 20 employees and had successfully created up to 400,000 new jobs.
【3】Opponents of the government’s strategy, including the millions of students and unionists who marched against it in the streets of Paris, called the law a betrayal by the French state and claimed the new measure would just make it easier for employers to hire cheap, disposable labor and keep young people in an unsteady netherworld of partial employment.
【4】When President Chirac decided to revoke the CPE after just eight days on the books, replacing it with a package of subsidies, some commentators labeled the action a humiliation for the government, a triumph of mob授权 rule and of the entitlement mentality. Some lamented the public reaction as a sign of the “depth of popular misunderstanding regarding the realities of our globalizing economy.”
【5】On a deeper level, the reaction against reforms to France’s labor laws is indicative of deeper anxieties, broadly held in Europe and elwhere, about how the forces of globalization are impacting the stability of the welfare state. In the eyes of many, the swifter the currents of globalization, the more fiercely the continental Europeans cl
ing to the traditions of the welfare state面试要带简历吗, “While most of the world struggles to cope with the shifting threats and opportunities of an increasingly global economy, much of Europe, and France in particular, remains devoted to a quasi-socialist ideal.” According to Dominique Moisi, “The French produce ‘ideas and dreams’ and they challenge the assumption of the liberal and market-oriented order by their refusal to accept change in the name of economic flexibility.”
【6】手机电充不进去French resistance to change largely stems from a very different conception of the social contract between the citizen and the state in the realm of job curity. On this subject, Philippe d’Iribarne, author of French Strangeness, has remarked, “In the American imagination, the relationship between a worker and employer is that of a supplier and a client…In France, when people work they say they have a ‘situation’, which they expect to endure for life.” The function of the state under this model is, above all el, to “make sure that workers are taken care of” in hopes of creating a “healthier, more humane society” than is possible in more fully liberalized economies. The pervasive role of the French government in employment is reinforced by the fact that 25 广州到杭州
percent of the country’s workforce is employed in the public ctor, with 45 percent of the national budget devoted to civil rvice salaries and pensions.过道吊顶效果图
