Thought I’d just let the news speak for itself…
Best job market in 5 years for grads: report
U.S. college graduates are facing the best job market since 2001, with business, computer, engineering, education and health care grads in highest demand, a report by an employment consulting firm showed on Monday.
Unions step up opposition to new employment contract
Trade unionists on Sunday said they would launch a general strike this week if Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin doesn’t withdraw his proposal for an employment contract that would make it easier for firms to lay off young workers without reason.
You know the only thing worse than an eeeevil greedy corporation is an eeeevil greedy corporation raking in so much cash that it needs to hire more graduates.
“We are approaching full employment and some employers are already dreaming up perks to attract the best talent,” said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Really, what we need are companies that recognize their social responsibility.
Over the past two weeks, peaceful student protests have escalated into outright confrontations with the police and the overnight occupation of the Sorbonne University as French youth resist a measure designed to tackle the country’s No.1 social problem. More than one in five young people in France is without a job.
Did I mention that you’re cute when you’re angry? I know that everything is owed to you, so you’re understandably upset. But didn’t anyone give you a hint of “tough love”?
But Challenger said graduates should not assume the improved labor market will guarantee everyone a job.
“Even as demand and salaries rise, college students should not be lulled into thinking that the job search will be easy or that jobs will be handed to anyone with a degree,” he warned.
Meanwhile…
Opponents of the planned Contrat de Premiere Embauche, also known as CPE, claim it will create systemic insecurity by making it more difficult for young workers to get a mortgage, for instance. In addition, they say the CPE would scupper France’s founding principles of solidarity and equality by treating workers differently depending on their age.
Oh, nevermind. At least you got solidarity, which along with $3.95, gets you a latte.
On Saturday, about 1.5 million protesters took to the streets in mass demonstrations. Trade unions gave de Villepin until Monday night to withdraw the proposal.
Bonus thought – next time you are being made to feel guilty because conservatives are so selfish. Remember these altrusitic young ‘uns.
UPDATE: The People’s Cube, as usual, are all over it.
A teaser:
Most French intellectuals agree that the ‘work for your money’ rule is an insult to French culture, claiming that the very survival of the legendary French work ethic may be at stake. “More work, personal responsibility, and efficiency are all dangerous signs of encroaching Americanization,” says the head of the philosophical department of the French Academy of Sciences. “We are happy to see so many young people today in the streets, willing to defend our traditional way of life based on idleness, arrogance, and corruption.”
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 9:49 pm and is filed under The Filthy French.
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March 21st, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Cranky, what’s $3.95 American in French francs? About three hundred million? Or are they using that currency anchor, the Euro? Who knows, and who cares? A country where 20% of “the young” are unemployed is not worth saving anyway.
March 21st, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I work with several college grads/students. Let me tell you. They are the laziest, disrespectful bunch I have seen in a long time. You have to constantly tell them what to do and when. Most have little or no respect for authority. They talk the way they want with no regard of who hears them. You can tell the ones who’s mommy and daddy didn’t make them do a damn thing growing up and never washed their mouth out with tobasco sauce. Not that I mind being a mentor to someone willing to learn a job. But hell if I will be a baby sitter for some snotty nosed 20 year old. That degree doesn’t amount to much for a good number of kids. They were passed on through college as they were in high school.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Reading your comment Sin, makes me think that a huge part of the left-right division is also a division along age lines.
We are parents, growns-ups and generally people who have to work for a living. We are now cynical enough not to buy utopian platititues unless the spouter actually lives what he says. (Farewell Chomsky and Streisand)
Our counterparts are probably ten to twenty years younger and lack the shock of realizing that the big bad World doesn’t owe them a thing.
I dunno, what do you think? Howzabout you, Rhod?
March 21st, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Cranky:
Thanks for asking, and you know I’ll relieve myself of an opinion, even if I don’t believe it…but I do believe this:
The problems of irrationality and arrogance we see today on the left began with my generation, those born just below the lower threshold of the Baby Boom. We had everything the post-war economy could provide, and it was easily had. We grew up with the dotty ideas fed to us by the materialists and utilitarians and progressives who filled the universities after WWII, and we passed them along to our kids. Some of them, like the people on this blog, broke away when the scales fell from their eyes.
But worse than the ideas was the intellectual arrogance of that era. It’s hard to imagine a world now where Arthur Schlesinger, Norman Mailer, Galbraith, Ginzburg or even John Kennedy, and dozens of others were taken seriously, but it existed, and all their conceits spilled into their politics and filled everyone who bought their crap with self-importance.
Now, with the thinkers and idea-mongers gone or nearly gone; their ideas moribund and discredited, the only things remaining are the snobberies that accompanied the ideas. Leftism at its best is little more than a class marker combined with stupidity. All the rest is window-dressing. If it’s an age division, as Cranky says, it’s not a matter of years, but the difference between the thinking of infants and adults.