CPE

The CNE is an employment law that allows workers in small businesses with fewer than 20 employees to be kept on a two-year probationary period during which they can be fired without reason. It is the sister law of the CPE which triggered waves of strikes, blockades, demonstrations and occupations across France in 2005-6

It is as workers that we are attacked and not as students!

The struggle against the CPE has mobilised youth in the education system, starting in higher education and then followed by the high schools, with the principal objective of forcing the withdrawal of Article 8 of the 'Equal Opportunities Law'. This article introduced a new punitive employment contract reserved for young workers. The objective of the struggle has been fully achieved.

1) What is this new law about youth employment called and what it is about?

A retrospective written by friends of Echanges et Mouvement. The text criticises the movement on a rather general level, e.g. of not being able to go beyond the boundaries of its student character and provides some overview of past student mobilisations in France.

The anti-CPE struggle
Extracts of an analysis by Theorie Communist

(...)

Occupation, not democracy!
Introduction

On Friday 10th November four militants, Jean-Pascal, Reda, Valentin and Pierre-Louis were sentenced by the court in Aix-en-Provence. All four were accused of "rebellion" and "violence towards members of the police force in the performance of their duties" during events as part of the anti-CPE movement.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin unveiled his labour law liberalisation package the CPE (’first employment contract’) on 16th January. He said that “urgent” action was needed to “bring the French labour market into the modern era”.

Several hundred students from various French universities had voted to re-occupy it, and around 200 students occupied a conference room, but were escorted out by riot police later that day.

When analysing the state of the working class, it is up to those looking at it to observe and evaluate the tendencies working within it. By this we don’t mean, “how many people have joined the Marxist-Leninist Workers’ League?” or “how many people self-identify as anarchists?” but something a little more subtle than that.

French group Alternative Libertaire stated:

The recent movement in France against the CPE have been a massive inspiration to militant workers the world over.

At the height of the anti-CPE rebellion, over 60 of France's 84 universities were occupied, on strike, or severely disrupted.

-the law that will replace the CPE pass by lower house, Reuters report that "Chirac's ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party used their majority in the lower house to force through legislation that will replace the job contract with new measures offering employers cash incentives to hire young workers. It was adopted by 151 votes for to 93 against.

The 20,000 students of Paul Valéry University have been called by the management department to vote for or against the release of the campus, as Jean-Marie Miossec, the president of the faculty, announced on Tuesday, 11th April. All access to the building accesses has been blocked by anti-CPE students since the 21st February.

Meanwhile, having obtained the withdrawal of the CPE, university and high-school students demonstrated calling for the abolition of the rest of the 'law of equal opportunities' which the CPE was a part of, and of the CNE contract which was introduced last September.