At the beginning of the Third Republic, a humorist said: ‘France has thirty million subjects, plus the subjects of discontent’. For those who lived through May 1968, seeing the police demonstrating in the streets while Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Krivine sit coolly in the European Parliament is a scenario as unlikely as the attacks on the World Trade Center. Albeit different, the political consequences are no less serious.
In the short term, what this shows is the failure of a policy which, alone in the developed world, continues to give priority, in terms of employment policy, to systematic increases in the number of civil servants and to public subsidies for private recruitment – even when the state of the national budget means that it can be financed only by borrowing! The tax-rich periods of 1998-2000 were not used to improve the conditions of the police or prison warders, but to increase the number of civil servants, even where there were enough of them, to recruit young people under youth contracts and to help firms to finance the 35-hour week. As soon as the economic situation changed, and tax revenue was less easy to come by, our leaders discovered to their horror that you cannot have your cake and eat it. It would be better to have well-trained and well-paid public employees, in greater numbers where they are really needed, than to increase the numbers of minor civil servants on the cheap and across the board. This is one of the major failures of the Jospin government.
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