Some musing on the (re)rioting in France... vs. Morocco

Now the riots have begun again with French youth, but this time in response to a new law on the brink of affect thru the French govt – this law that was supposed to appease the demonstrators of last November. The idea is to relax the standards of both hiring and firing in the work force so that, with more fluidity in employment, young new employees will have more access to jobs. The problem is that, instead of attacking unemployment by creating more jobs, French interior minister villepin simply wants to rearrange the workers among the jobs that already exist – by reducing job security and allowing youth under the age of 26 to be more easily hired and fired. But simply a temporary job is not what these youth need – they need an economy that can incorporate them and still offer the security and workers rights that they deserve.

A similar issue exists in Morocco, where college graduates are actually driven back into school simply to have something constructive to do, while the labor economy continues to flounder, flooded with overqualified and impatient workers. One option for Moroccans is to create their own means of employment by way of creating NGOs (which are, in a spirit of democracy and participatory government, largely funded by the national budget), but even this has its problematics - there is little training done to ensure that these organizations are making good use of their money and resources and that their work is coordinated with the work of the government and other similarly-minded organizations. And above all, even if university students are leaving with degrees in economics, law, sociology, you name it, there are few and far between young people with the practical skills necessary for survival in the modern world: internet competency, public speaking, executive writing skills, etc.

I’ve always said about Mac that, even if I leave with far from a mastery of “international studies,” at least I’ll have had the opportunities via presentations, papers, internships, conferences, etc, that have given me some professional skills to make me economically attractive, even if only as a competent processor of information and someone who can take initiative and get things done when needed. But without this, and without the abundance of café and movie high school jobs in the U.S. to employ all those without those semi-professional skills, how many American youth would also be wandering the streets waiting to smash cars for lack of anything else to do?