France’s rioters: get them on the payroll
By
Simon Wilson Nov 29, 2005
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Ten years ago, when the then Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, was campaigning to be France’s president, he gave a warning about the strains in French society, said Le Monde.
Chirac-the-candidate warned that disaffected youths in the poor suburbs, many of them of African and Arab origin, would end up revolting if they couldn’t find jobs – and pledged to take action.
How right he was back then. This “explosion of violence in the suburbs – this ‘urban havoc’, as General de Gaulle might have said – is an uncompromising indictment of Chirac’s failure to deliver on his promises”. Yet the president made no statement on the riots convulsing France for ten days. And then he only offered “vague words, formulated haltingly”.
But then, perhaps France’s politicians can be forgiven for not grasping the gravity of the situation more quickly, said Mark Landler in The New York Times. The whole of France was slow to react, “in part because the initial nights of unrest did not seem particularly unusual in a country where an average of more than 80 cars a day were set on fire this year”, even before the upsurge in violence.
In other words, France’s problem is chronic and structural, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Paris might be burning now, but the fire has been building for decades. According to many French commentators, it is surprising that riots didn’t break out earlier: “if you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and then subject them to daily discrimination at the hands of employers and police, you can hardly expect peace and tranquillity.”
“Pure criminality is visible. So too is an anarchists’ cocktail of alienation by race and religion and youth against the institutions of the republican secular state.” Certainly, there is an ethnic, religious dimension, said Freedland – and France’s key problem is that it can’t face that fact. France’s model of ‘republican integration’ insists that all citizens are equal, regardless of skin colour or faith. “It is literally illegal for anyone compiling an official census to even ask about someone’s ethnic origins.”
But these lofty ideals don’t work well in today’s France because they let racism flourish unchecked. In practice, French workers with Algerian names face massive discrimination in the jobs market. Yet in legal terms, their ethnic origin is irrelevant.
This refusal to admit that ethnic and religious minorities exist helps create a France that is “defensive and exclusive”, that seems to cast people out of society rather than draw them in, said David Aaronovitch in The Times. Yet the underlying problem is economic, said the FT.
The alienation felt by France’s poor draws strength from lack of economic opportunities. Youth unemployment in France is 21%, yet in some of the riot-hit suburbs, the rate for young Muslims is more than 40%. “Work, and the hope of advancement it brings, is the best integration strategy.”
France should cut its minimum wage and payroll taxes to make work pay. It should also cut the job-protection rights of those in work “to create more of a level playing-field for those without”. A healthier economy is not a panacea, “but economic opportunity reduces the reservoir of dissatisfaction in which anger and hate breed. Justice and common-sense demand it should be extended to all.”
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