France Faces Standoff Over Loosening Job Protections

A political battle over a new labor law escalated Sunday as unions and students threatened new nationwide protests and the government rejected demands to withdraw the law.

Both sides sounded defiant a day after more than 500,000 people took part in occasionally violent marches across France to protest the measure, which would let employers fire workers younger than 26 without cause during their first two years on the job.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has staked his reputation on the measure to loosen labor protections. Business groups and many political leaders say France’s broad labor protections are to blame for high youth unemployment.

“I am convinced that it will work -- that it will create new jobs,” De Villepin said of the new law in an interview Sunday with a youth-oriented magazine.

Although he insisted that he would not relent, De Villepin said he would consider “improvements” to “respond to everyone’s concerns.”

In response, leaders of the center-left opposition warned that official intransigence could worsen street clashes that resulted in 52 minor injuries and 167 arrests Saturday night.

“What’s the use of waiting for the next protest?” demanded Francois Hollande, leader of the Socialist Party. “The measure of wisdom and responsibility is to withdraw the [law] and open negotiations.”

Leaders of unions and student groups planned to meet Monday to consider calling a general strike for Thursday if the government did not scuttle the law, which has been approved by the legislature but not implemented. On Saturday, the groups gave the government 48 hours to back down. General strikes in previous years have brought the country to a near-standstill.

Coming four months after France’s worst urban riots in recent history, the crisis is crucial for De Villepin’s increasingly fragile government. By contrast to the largely spontaneous and anarchic riots by youths of immigrant descent, protests by France’s powerful labor unions are a periodic ritual and are often quickly defused by compromise.

But there is only a year left until presidential elections, and with political parties across the spectrum torn by disarray, the unrest could destabilize the lame-duck administration of President Jacques Chirac.

De Villepin hopes to succeed Chirac, his mentor, but he has never held elective office. A former foreign minister, he is relatively untested on the domestic front. The prime minister sees the new law, known by the initials CPE, as a way of making his mark by tackling stubborn youth unemployment that reaches 50% in working-class immigrant areas and was a contributing factor in last year’s riots.

Displaying his penchant for taking risks, the hard-charging and eloquent De Villepin thinks he will bolster his leadership credentials if he stands firm, according to analysts.

His popularity has suffered in recent weeks, however. Whereas 60% of respondents described him as courageous in a poll published by the newspaper Le Parisien, only 35% judged him as “being up to the challenge of events,” a decline of 11%.

Giving employers flexibility in dismissing young workers during a two-year trial period may seem modest by the standards of other countries. But the French jealously guard a costly benefit system that makes firing workers extremely difficult. Employers say those benefits discourage hiring and job creation.

The dispute has galvanized aggressively leftist student unions, which tend to be dominated by middle- and upper-class young people who are not the primary victims of unemployment. Marches, campus takeovers and skirmishes with riot police have shut down dozens of universities in past weeks. About a thousand students held a counter-demonstration at Paris City Hall on Sunday, demanding that protesters end blockades and allow them to study and attend classes.

The prevailing tone was confrontational.

“We’ve got to continue our mobilization,” said Jean-Claude Mailly, secretary-general of the Force Ouvriere union, wire services reported. “The prime minister is like a pyromaniac who has set fire to the valley and then withdraws to the hill to watch.”

Polls published Sunday indicated that almost three out of four respondents wanted the labor law modified or withdrawn. The polls found that 71% feared “a profound social crisis that will gather force in the coming weeks.”