According to official data, 22.7% of French citizens under the age of 25 are officially registered as unemployed. This is more than twice the corresponding figure for other age groups (for example, the unemployment rate among French people aged 35-50 does not exceed 9%). The results of a survey conducted by the sociological agency LH2 at the request of the newspaper Liberation show that the threat of being left without work after graduating from university ranks first among the problems worrying French youth. “It is not surprising that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has taken up this problem,” said François Miquet-Marty, director of the LH2 agency, in an interview with the Bloomberg agency. “Most likely, in 2007 de Villepin will put forward his candidacy for the post of President of France, and already today he wants to secure the votes of young voters.”
The program to combat youth unemployment consists of a set of bills, the first of which were submitted by the government to the National Assembly on January 16. The “Villepin program” radically changes French labor legislation, providing young job seekers without work experience with actually guaranteed employment. Under the terms of the new legislation, a company of any form of ownership with a staff of 20 or more employees is obliged to hire at least one employee under 25 years of age without work experience in the specialty each year. The “youth quota” increases in proportion to the size of the company: for example, an enterprise with a staff of 250 people is obliged to hire 12 young specialists annually. Otherwise, from the beginning of 2007, employers will be charged an additional tax. The “Villepin program” also includes a system to encourage young people to look for work. Persons under 25 years of age who have been receiving unemployment benefits for more than six months (there are 240,000 such people today) will receive additional payments from the budget for three years if they take up permanent employment by January 1, 2007.
It would seem that students should be grateful to the government, but they want to receive additional guarantees from their future employers. In the first version of the “Villepin program,” companies that hired employees under 25 years old did not have the right to fire them for three years. Conservatives in the National Assembly removed this clause. “Now companies can take on students every year and fire them every year, circumventing the new legislation,” says a press release from the trade union association Union Nationale des Syndicats Autonomes de Fonctionnaires, which is one of the organizers of the protest action.
“The new bill does not provide any stability,” complained one of the Parisian female students to a correspondent for the Euronews television channel. “You can’t even rent an apartment because you have no guarantees that tomorrow you won’t end up on the street.”
According to the aforementioned LH2 agency, the rating of Dominique de Villepin among voters aged 18 to 25 is steadily declining. If in December 50% of young French people spoke out for de Villepin becoming president of France in 2007, then in January their number fell to 49%, and by the beginning of February it did not exceed 44%.