Why French youths protest an age of insecurity

"Utopia or nothing."

The slogan spray-painted on a wall opposite the Sorbonne University in Paris recalls the insurrectionary days of May '68, when students occupied their universities, fought pitched battles with riot police, and dreamed of overthrowing the French state in a cultural lifestyle revolution.

For today's student demonstrators, though, "utopia" has nothing to do with the visions of free love, revolution, and liberation from the bourgeois state that inspired their parents' generation. For most of them "utopia" simply means a steady job.

"This is the opposite of May '68," says François Dubet, a sociologist specializing in youth issues at Bordeaux University. "Then, kids were certain they would enter society, even if they didn't like that society. Today young people have the impression society has no room for them."

Tuesday's protest - including strikes expected to interrupt air, train, and subway services in the capital - is the sixth staged by students in recent weeks to demand the withdrawal of a new labor law. Unions said Monday that more than 135 demonstrations were planned nationwide.

The "First Job Contract," known by its French acronym CPE, would allow employers to fire recruits under age 26 without giving a reason during their first two years on the job.

"Our fear is that life is not going to be better for us than it was for our parents," explains Vincent Camroux, a young student leader helping to organize the demonstrations. "We don't have the same assurances they did that tomorrow things will be better."

The government hopes companies would be more willing to take on young people, and thus make a dent in the 23 percent youth-unemployment rate, if they knew it would be easier to fire them.

French employers have long been demanding more flexible labor laws, arguing that the lengthy and expensive procedures often required to fire workers makes it hard for them to remain internationally competitive.

The protesters, backed by the unions and the opposition Socialist party, see the CPE - due to come into force next month - as an attack on hallowed job-protection rights that underpin France's generous model of social security. They also complain that the measure unfairly discriminates against youths.

"Young people do not want to be the variables to be adjusted by a society in crisis," says Erwan Lecoeur, a political analyst at the Observatory of Public Debate, a Paris think tank. "And they feel they are losing what their parents won" in the way of labor rights over the past 40 years.

French youths' attraction to a secure job with a predictable future - once the norm in France - has been measured by recent polls.

One survey last year found 76 percent of young French citizens keen on working in the public sector - in the post office, on the railways, or as a teacher, for example - mainly for the job security such careers offer.

But not everyone is so unadventurous. Mr. Camroux, for example, a second-year law student at the Sorbonne, says he is quite ready for the challenges that a globalized economy will pose when he graduates, and knows he will jump from job to job during his working life.

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