On France, and the “Right” to Work

My sources say “no.”

The internet’s home for socialists of all shapes & colors, Workers World is again spouting the dogmatic nonsense that there can somehow exist a “right” to work. “Right” is in quotes to differentiate from legitimate rights.

“In France, unlike in the United States, workers’ right to their jobs is protected by law, and it is difficult for management to fire workers once they have been hired. . . CPE offers a two-year contract for youth that Villepin claims will ease unemployment. However, the law’s provision that youth can be fired at will actually make it more difficult for them to find and hold long-term employment”

Well, with an unemployment rate as high as it is (50% for some demographics), it doesn’t seem that France’s current system has done a very good job protecting that “right.” I can’t imagine a situation where it could possibly be more difficult to find employment than one in which persists a staggering 23% unemployment. “Workers” never tells us. It simply resorts to communist dogma.

Reading between the lines, we can determine that such “rights” (read “laws”) make it hard for the employer to fire even the shittiest workers, which in turn, explains the dreadful time most frenchies have finding a job – no employer wants to play russian-roullette with his staff. No employer wants to hire anyone, only to be prevented from firing him in the future if he doesn’t work out.

On the contrary, nobody, anywhere, ever, wants to fire a good employee. It simply is not the pandemic that Workers would like us to believe it is. Where & when good employees do get the ax, it’s often because of structural changes in the particular affected industry, or lousy management that has succeeded in doing nothing but running a business into the ground. If France is truly replete with lousy management, it should be an investor’s paradise; there is a literal cornucopia of unused labor, of all skill levels and knowledge levels.

I’ll conclude, as others before me have done, that such a “right to work” cannot exist without forcing someone else to employ you. Who that person is, how that person is chosen – quite irrelevant. What matters is that invoking the use of force negates the very concept of freedom. It negats the legitimate rights of the employers, to employ who they want, when they want, how they want.