Europe, RIP

French demonstrate to keep 35-hour work week

Hundreds of thousands of French people took part in demonstrations across the country to protest against government plans to reform the 35-hour work week.

Organized by an alliance of trade-unions and backed by the opposition Socialist party (PS), more than half a million people took part in marches in 100 towns and cities -- with 90,000 joining the largest demonstration in Paris. Police put the overall figure at slightly more than 250,000.

The protests came as a bill to enable private sector employees to opt for longer hours makes its way through parliament. The bill is expected to pass its first reading in the National Assembly on Monday.

The key social change of the last Socialist administration, the mandatory 35-hour week has been attacked by President Jacques Chirac's centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) for putting up the cost of labour and helping create the country's stubbornly high unemployment.

However the left accuses the government of trying to turn back the clock, and jeopardising social progress via an ideological obsession with labour market flexibility.

Polls showed that nearly 70 percent of the public support or have sympathy with the protests, which come after three days of strikes in the public sector late last month.

...

France suffers from an unemployment rate of around 10 percent -- almost double that of Britain -- and Raffarin recently promised to bring it down to nine percent, a drop of some 250,000 job-seekers, in a year.

The changes would not effectthe public sector which employs nearly one in four French workers. (emphasis ours)
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Ladies and gents, we give you Old -- and decrepit -- Europe.

Who the hell wants to be allies with these people, let alone emulate their emasculated, infantile existence?

De Tocqueville's "immense and tutelary power" has lulled the nations of Old Europe into a state of perpetual childhood.

We feel much more in common with the brave Iraqis who are trying to build a free and prosperous nation than we do with these guileless poltroons.