France has scrapped its proposed youth jobs laws that allows workers in their first two years of employment to be fired at will. The idea behind the bill, backed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, was to give employers more incentive to hire the young by alleviating their fears of getting a slacker they wouldn’t be able to get rid of. Things had been so bad in France that no one wanted to hire anyone. Consequently, young people had the highest rates of unemployment, by far, in the nation – something like 20%, with at least 40% unemployment rates among the children of unassimilated immigrants. It was horrible, because these people didn’t even have the prospect of ever getting employment.

As Albert Camus once said, “Without work, all life becomes rotten.” Al wasn’t kidding.

But it was worse than that: workers who were lucky enough to be inside the employment bubble under these ground rules had little incentive to perform. After all, if you could never be fired, wouldn’t you too take a four-hour lunch each day? Why work? So, despite the fact that France has one of the highest educated work forces in Europe, it was not a competitive one, especially not by global standards.

Not that it wasn’t nuanced.

French students are indeed a lazy coddled lot who fully expect a free ride after they complete their state-financed studies. They grew up this way, why would they change? They don’t like the new system that forces them to work for two years in a way that’s productive to their employers. In fact, having been educated in leftist schools, they don’t even trust employers. They actually believe employers would fire them out of meanness, or caprice, or just for the fun of it, given their strange primitive pinheaded leftist ideas about the Evil Corporate World Out For Profits, and not because they are not productive. They distrust corporations, want job security even though they don’t have jobs and are furious and out there burning things.

But who … who, really … likes a two-tier system? It’s great if you’re on the upper tier, but terrible if you get the bottom bunk.

The students feared that all the workers above them would get four-hour lunches and they would be stuck filling in for them, having to do the work of those who should be working but who aren’t, because they have no fear of being fired.

Second, why should there be multi-tiers of privilege in the French economy? Why not have EVERYONE fire-able at will? Why should some be fireable and not others? Why not get rid of the tiers? Maybe the problem is the tiers!

France, after all, is all about egalite. This gripe from the spoiled French youth about tiers does have a point. But rather than suggest that EVERYONE be forced to work hard, they want to keep the tiers, only with themselves on the upper one. (And the Arab immigrant kids on the lower one.) They hate tiers when it applies to them the wrong way but they don’t want to get rid of tiers. Their minds don’t stretch that far. Off korss zere must be ze tiers!

It sort of resembles the age-old problem Socialism, and commmunism. Ever meet a communist? Ask him if he’d like to LIVE UNDER communism. With someone other than himself getting to be the commissar. Chances are, he’d say no. It just goes to show that these philosophies are great, if you’re the top commie calling the shots and getting access to the dollar stores. They’re horrible if you’re standing in line with your ration card in front of the stone-faced bureaucrat hoping the bread doesn’t run out. Everyone who says he is a socialist, or communist, fully expects to be the guy calling the shots. Nobody, on the other hand, wants to live UNDER socialism. That’s the basic problem of these ideological systems, their inherent privilege for the select few.

And like any Latin American society (my Belgian friends call the French ‘Northern Latin Americans’), French society is premised on privileges, tiers and tiers of privilege, the spoiled students have privileges of jobs over the Arab immigrants’ children, the old workers have privileges of laziness over the young who must bust butt, the graduates of fancy state universities get government jobs over the graduates of lowbrow polytechnics.

It’s like that all over Europe and Latin America, and especially in France. There is no such thing as equal opportunity for all, equal standards for all. It all has to be in tiers. And nobody questions the tiers. Well, there is a problem with those tiers, and now Monsieur de Villepin, graduate of that admin ecole in Paris that is so self-important, and warrior poet and other crap associated with the leftist self-identified intellectuals, is going down with this ship. Good.

Gateway Pundit has tons more on this, here.

Fausta has a bit more here.

iNo Pasaran! has some glorious observations here.

Emirates Economist has a good roundup of the best writing on France here.

Academic Elephant has a must-read analysis on this development here.