Affordable Housing Institute : US

The riots that bloom in the spring, predicted here several months ago, have so far proved to be about not housing but jobs.  As a result, this post has little directly to do with housing, but bear with me: these riots have the same root cause, the French cycle of violence is still rising, and before it is over, housing will be its main stage. 

 

“Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night.”

 

As the Washington Post reports:

 

PARIS, March 18 — Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in anti-government protests Saturday across France, with the largest of the rallies ending in clashes between riot police and protesters at one of the largest plazas in Paris.

 

Teachers, unionized government employees and retired workers joined students in escalating demonstrations against a new law that would allow companies to fire employees under age 26 at will during their first two years of work.

 

Protesters jammed the streets of about 150 cities and towns in mostly peaceful, union-orchestrated demonstrations.

 

In spring a young Enarque’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of strike:

 

On a perfect sunny day for a protest in Paris, families joined in the march, which began in an atmosphere of a friendly weekend outing of songs and chants with political overtones.

 

Students march in Paris against a law allowing firms to fire employees under age 26 at will during their first two years of work. After dark, some protesters clashed with riot police, but no serious injuries were reported.

 

As the sun goes down, the evil can hijack the good:

 

As the hours-long parade drew to a close in the chill of the early evening darkness, several hundred protesters turned on police at the Place de la Nation in the southeastern part of the city, throwing stones, garbage and sticks at riot police who huddled behind protective shields.

 

Demonstrators smashed windows, burned a car and set a pile of boxes ablaze. City police said 14 protesters were detained and four officers were slightly injured in the standoff.

 

As with the November riots, violence is intoxicating, and unpunished violence even more so:

 

The demonstrations have grown larger and have spread to more cities in recent days at the urging of France’s powerful student and worker unions, creating a crisis for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and his Union for a Popular Movement party as France heads toward presidential elections next year.

 

Indeed, as reported in the group blog Brussels Journal:

 

French university students have been rioting for over more than a week against a new labour bill recently passed by a large majority in parliament: the First Employment Contract (CPE, Contract Premier Embauche). In a country where the street is more powerful than parliament it is highly unlikely that the CPE will ever be enforced. Moreover, it looks like the CPE is going to be Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s Waterloo.

 

“Catastrophe is a precondition of fundamental reform,” n’est-ce pas?

 

Villepin proposed the CPE to provide jobs for young workers, a group with staggering unemployment rates.

 

Note that while the employment rates are all waves, ergo structurally related, France’s are lowest throughout.

 

As the Post reports it:

 

Villepin pushed the new law as a vehicle to prompt companies to hire more young people at a time when joblessness among that group averages 23% and exceeds 40% in some poor neighborhoods populated by immigrants and their French-born children. Villepin argued that under existing labor laws, employers were increasingly reluctant to hire young people because of job protections that make it all but impossible to fire workers, even if they are incompetent.

 

For what are these folks rioting?

 

Young people and unions argue that the law — expected to take effect in April — will allow employers to discriminate against their youngest workers.

 

In practice, they are rioting for the right to be permanently unemployed, as the law would stimulate creation of thousands of jobs:

 

Job creation in France is severely hampered by “social” legislation which makes it virtually impossible for employers to lay off employees unless the latter are paid high damages. The CPE enables French employers to lower the cost of job creation by allowing them to hire workers under the age of 26 for a conditional two-year period during which they can be fired without compensation.

 

Parliament had good arguments for approving the CPE.  Last August a similar bill was introduced to allow small companies (with fewer than 20 employees) to fire new employees during a trial period without the normal prohibitive procedures that make it impossible for companies to hire and fire in response to market demands. In barely five months these small companies created 335,000 new jobs. According to the Parisian research institute Ifop one third of these new jobs were the direct result of the new bill.

 

This is the political philosopher’s stone: 100,000 jobs created without costing the government a thing.  Indeed, these new jobs took people off the welfare roles and onto the tax rolls: political phlogiston!

 

Does everything!

 

Truly remarkable here is that the law being protested is already in effect, just for smaller firms.  And it is desperately needed, as part of a multi-pronged overhaul of the French dirigiste welfare state:

 

Last November’s violent rioting of immigrant youths in the suburbs prompted Villepin to introduce the CPE. Though these riots were ethnic rather than social, social dissatisfaction certainly exacerbated the situation. The politically correct view adhered to by the French political elite, whom Villepin represents, is that the November “intifida” was a social conflict caused by high unemployment.

 

Hence, it was only natural that the Prime Minister wanted to tackle the problem of youth unemployment with a sensible youth labour bill.

 

This was entirely predictable output of the government factory: a labor liberalization law is easier than tackling the high-rises, because that would cost big money.

 

Still, the high-rises that must be torn down and rebuilt still loom:

 

High-rises, Paris, November, 2005.

 

Last November our friend Joel Shepherd, commenting from Paris, explained that there was some truth in the claim that social dissatisfaction exacerbated the situation of the immigrants. Joel described the situation in the banlieues:

 

There’s just no damn jobs. White college grads can’t get jobs, what hope do immigrants from regions with bad schools have? […] They can’t change schools to get a better education because the government says you have to go to the school where you live, and they live where they do because of the zoning laws … which I’m no expert about, but I do know that the government owns 30% of all housing in France, and poor immigrants basically live where they’re told.

 

There is the ecosystemic interdependence: jobs <> education <> housing <> government policy.

 

Clichy sous Bois, November, 2005.

 

Doubtless unintentionally, the housing policy is channeling families to places where they have minimal job prospects and become dependents of the state:

 

 

The government tries to give them everything and does it extremely badly, there’s no upward mobility, and it doesn’t breed a happy community.

 

and then allowing them to fester, out of sight and out of mind:

 

Where I lived was with my dadda and mum in the flats of Municipal Flatblock 18A, between Kingsley Avenue and Wilsonsway.  I got to the big main door with no trouble, through I did pass one young malchick sprawling and creeching and moaning in the gutter, all cut about lovely, and saw in the lamplight also streaks of blood here and there like signatures, my brothers, of the night’s fillying.  And I too saw just by 18A a pair of devotchka’s neezhnies doubtless rudely wrenched off in the heat of the moment, O my brothers.  And so in.

 

Housing is where jobs go to sleep at night, and where the unemployed vent their rage.

 

“It’s always better to earn one franc than nothing,” said Sophia Lamri, 23, a law school graduate interning at a law firm.  [So create jobs! — Ed.]  “The government is just about to get rid of a social policy that took over a hundred years to build. Change shouldn’t mean regression.”

 

Unfortunately, for France, the status quo is regression, and its heir is collapse.

 

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