If the Unemployed Can't Have Work

Bistro, café or restaurant; sometimes it is all the same.

They Will Accept Money Instead

Paris:- Saturday, 10. January 1998:- Some unemployed people, who have been unemployed in France for a long time, had the idea at Christmas time that they and their families should have Christmas - just about like everybody else who is currently employed.

To do this they need some money, cash, moola, folding green, you name it. After all, they reason, it is not their fault they are unemployed and are unable to make the economy chug along a little bit more energetically; enough so as to perhaps even... employ them.

'Can't be done,' say the leaders of the government, the unions, the employer's associations, the economists and everybody else with an opinion on the subject - most of whom are employed at doing what they do.

So a very tiny, small, few, minority, really not many, unemployed occupied some government employment agencies. Their spokesmen said they wanted a 3,000 franc 'bonus.'

Some local officials looked in their petty cash and agreed to try and hand out a thousand to the few protestors they had on hand. Other local officials locked the unemployed out of the unemployment offices before they could occupy them.

Out of maybe 600 or so of these offices around France, perhaps 20 or 30 have been occupied by the unemployed at one time or another over the past four weeks. There are millions of individual unemployed and they aren't really taking over unemployment offices in any big way.

However, the government is taking it very seriously and some ministers may have even forsaken their usual winter holidays.

The President of the Republic thought the matter serious enough to break a months' long TV silence. Opposition right-wing politicos have been mostly keeping quiet because they had the problem when they were in the majority, and they got nowhere with it.

During the week, chilling statistics from Germany showed unemployment rising there, to unheard-of levels.

Inflation is only rising by tiny amounts because the government keeps adding to the prices of gasoline and cigarettes and increasing taxes; without these increases there would be minus inflation.

Exports are doing good, booking solid pluses. The Paris Bourse is doing well too, having just clocked in its third or fourth year in a row of solid gains. Company profits are generally healthy, and the Bourse reflects this.

A lady on TV tonight said, "Look at my husband. He's 40. At the unemployment office they say he's too old." The guy gets maybe ten days work a month, doing odd-jobs. When he does, the family sees meat; the rest of the month all they see is rice and pasta.

Unemployment is a constant theme of talk on the street. People can't believe the government wants them to sit around and vegetate; they've grown up with the notion the government runs things - but year after year of seeing the government seemingly impotent to act in any positive way, must be shaking the faith a bit.

Teenage kids have apparently declared wars on buses and some of them are into torching cars as well. You think they go downtown and burn up the Mercs double-parked outside Fauchon?

Oh no. They simply take the elevator down from the housing silos they live in and burn up their neighbor's third-hand Fiestas and Opels.

The professors at the government-financed CNRS think-tanks don't seem to have any plausible answers that might explain why the kids do this - and even if they did, the kids seem to be unstoppable.

Well, there are a few idle hands around for the police to hire and if they hire enough of them maybe there would be fewer left over for mischief; and if this turned out to be effective, what are we waiting for?

Let's all go work for the cops. Those who don't want to wear uniforms, can be robbers instead. If we are all cops and robbers, then everybody will be getting caught and then, instead of unemployment, we'll have the big moral dilemma of not putting the bad guys in jail because the country doesn't do anything but cops and robbers, and there's not a penny to spare to build jails to hold half the population.

A very important French language problem in France popped up during the week. One of the lady government ministers, Ségolène Royale - official title: 'la ministre déléguée chargée de l'ensignement scolaire' - no caps - has brought it up.