Job Incurity and the Welfare State in a Globalized World
On April 10, 2006, French President Jacques Chirac① 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. 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.
高中作文大全The government believed that France’s complex and inflexible labor laws – a high minimum wage, high payroll taxes, generous benefits, and an onerous labor code, all enshrined in many different contracts and numerous collective bargaining② 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.
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护绿>产险理赔系统 in an unsteady netherworld of partial employment.
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 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.”
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 cling to t
服务我he traditions of the welfare state, “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.”
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 percent of the country’
s workforce is employed in the public ctor, with 45 percent of the national budget devoted to civil rvice③ salaries and pensions.
Many advocates of greater economic liberalization attribute France’s economic 上海大观园stagnation and political deadlock – conditions symptomatic of much of Europe – to the “hypertrophy” of the welfare state. In a country where “75 per cent of young people openly declare that their dream in life is to become a civil rvant, something is obviously wrong…A lack of confidence in the future and fear of precariousness have taken over the spirit of adventure, a frame of mind in which to be protected from life becomes more important than what you do in life.” The flexibility necessary for a healthy economy in an increasingly fast-paced world comes at the expen of the curity that most workers – including more and more young workers – cherish.
At bottom, as Dominique Moisi has said, “The hostility towards the concept of flexibility in the labor market was not only the product of a reactionary, status quo impul, but the result of a deep rentment at eing one’s life being so totally at the disposal of others.”
Trying to shut one’s borders to the forces of globalization is, however, no longer a viable option. Continued calls for state intervention in labor markets merely accelerate an already vicious cycle in which protectionism begets slower growth and unemployment, thus multiplying the need for more extensive social safety nets and exacerbating the original problem.
Concerns over job curity are by no means confined to France or even Europe; rather, they are grounded in changes in global labor markets that impact every country, including the United States. Three forces are reshaping labor markets around the world: First, an oversupply of increasingly mobile workers relative to capital and investment; Second, technological innovations that put previously isolated workers in competition with one another; and third, increas in productivity that, while beneficial in the long term, contribute to short-term economic instability.
The interaction of the forces has resulted in declining wages for manufacturing and unskilled workers – a phenomenon now beginning to affect rvice and skilled workers as well.
Whatever jobs are created by robust一个色的综合 US economic growth are often not as good as the ones being lost; many new jobs are in the “low-wage and low-skill end of the non-unionized rvice ctor – on the check-out counter at Home Depot or delivering Domino’s pizzas. Often tho are replacing cure jobs at places such as General Motors or Ford that traditionally provided generous wages and full health and pension cover.”
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