What a Mess!

It's a lot warmer and new flowers blossom every day, but it's hard to extol the virtues of Spring, when you have a ceiling down, a rotten roof and short-circuits in half the lighting. What a series of minor domestic catastrophes brings home is the craziness of the French employment system. The employers can't afford to take on workers and the unemployed can't afford to work. That means that I can't get my roof fixed this year.

The government's badly presented CPE (a proposed exemption from the two-year employment guarantee for employers taking on first-time employees under 26) has aroused the battle-cry of "No work is better than work without security." A weird alliance of over-protected baby boomers (who know their rights) and the unemployed armies of the underprivileged in the city suburbs (many of whom will probably never be employed) makes for manifestations and general strikes. As France is governed by the patricians but controlled by the unions, it's really up to the latter to propose a solution, but they are more interested in bringing down the government.