The French are revolting

I’ve been following (from a safe distance) these strikes and protests in France over the issue of raising the retirement age.

I say, “from a safe distance”, because if things hadn’t disintegrated in the precise pattern they did a few months ago, my plan had been to be in country around this time, driving up the Rhône valley and exploring historical French violence from the Romans to the Nazis. (If you’re a New Military Historian, France is fab for zeroing in on the societal costs of war.)

But not so much fun if you’ve paid €450 per week for the smallest rental car available and then can’t find diesel to run it. Or have to step around piles of garbage in historic town centres because the trash workers have been on strike for two weeks.

(The idle inclination does arise to wonder what might have happened if the French had been as vigorous in defending their human rights in 1940 as in 2010; but of course, those were different times. And we’d have a lot fewer doctoral dissertations floating around than we do.)

The issues, of course, are complicated (not that you’d know that from US media coverage). Americans, who (except for those in senior management at large corporations—they’re guaranteed millions whether they’re productive or not) realistically know that they have no hope of retiring at the official age of 65 or 67, don’t get the uproar over having retirement being raised from 60 to 62. But the French can pay in the vicinity of 50% income tax, as well as other “social charges” to the state, which are their side of a contract with the government to guarantee such amenities as employment security, high quality affordable healthcare and recognition that they’re actually partners in this civil covenant.

This has been accompanied by some degree of stultification in the employment social structure: it’s freaking hard to find professional work if you haven’t had your ticket punched at the right universities, and damned near impossible for employers to fire staff for any cause short of mass murder, much less to lay them off. So that when the economy tanks, it’s usually corporations that take it in the shorts.

Which, although not an altogether bad thing, makes it really hard for business to turn on a franc to meet new challenges.

And even though the crisis facing the French pension system makes our Social Security look like a Baldridge award-winning organization (do they still even give out Baldridge awards, or is that just so 90s?), it’s a flat fact that humans do not like you taking away something they’ve become accustomed to having. And since the prerequisite to retiring at age 60 is having put in 40 years of labor, it’s not like the pension hasn’t been earned.

Frankly, although Americans tend to deride the sort of noisy, posturing, violent and yet fête-like demonstrations we’ve been seeing, I admire the French for refusing to go gentle into that good night. They’re showing much more intestinal fortitude in defending their right to be respected for their labor than the US workforce, which seems to have undergone a collective spinectomy. My personal opinion is that we should have had riots in the streets about the time of the WorldCom-Enron-Adelphia mess. If that had happened, the latest round of egregious corporate crimes against the economy might have been mitigated considerably.

I.e., if executive management had seen some negative consequences associated with their acts of greed, they might have considered different ways of turning a few billion bucks.

Instead, all we get are these Tea Party yahoos, whose primary goal is to move us into a state of Redneck Sharia law without any social supports for healthcare, employment security or basic civility. Their goal seems to be nothing so much as returning us to the 1950s, when women and minorities knew their place; Congress was white, male and Republican; and it was always morning in America.

Ironically, they owed a good chunk of the prosperity and security of that era to the gains made by union struggles during the early decades of the century. You know, like the French ones that are taking to the streets now…