Kleenex workers.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberte. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer's whim.

The French government's rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist's standpoint: Make it easier for employers to tire young people and they will be more willing to hire them. So why was Paris burning?

What corporations call "flexibility"--the right to dispose of workers at will--is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn't want to become what they call "a Kleenex generation"--used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.

You may recognize in the French government's reasoning the same arguments Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: "What?" scream the economists who flack for the employing class. "If you do anything, anything at 'all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you--lacking, of course, the healthcare and other benefits provided by the French welfare state--will quickly spiral down into starvation."

French youth weren't buying this, probably because they know where the "Anglo-Saxon model," as they call it, leads. If you have to give up job security to get a job, what next? Will the pampered employers be inspired to demand a suspension of health and safety regulations? Will they start requiring their workers to polish their shoes while hand-feeding them hot-buttered croissants? Non to all that, the French kids said.

Of course, the French weren't entirely fair in calling their nemesis the "Anglo-Saxon model." It's the specifically American model they have to fear. While France was in turmoil, I was in England...