LES JEUNES--UNE VICTOIRE!

Sam Graham-Felsen writes: Bowing to insurmountable pressure from France's students and labor unions, President Jacques Chirac has repealed the CPE law. The students won because they put together an extraordinary protest movement. Witnessing hundreds of thousands of youth from all different ethnic and class backgrounds marching together, chanting in unison for seven straight hours was one of the most remarkable experi-ences of my life. I vividly remember, around the sixth hour of the protest, students chanting: "We are not tired! We are not tired!" These students aren't delusional. They believe in markets and support globalization and trade. They simply refuse to accept that for capitalism to function, it must be totally unregulated and unharnessed. Despite its numerous protections for workers, France is the world's fifth-largest economy, and despite its lifetime employment laws, thirty-five-hour workweeks and seven-week vacations, France has the highest worker productivity in the world. The students are anything but conservative; they're visionaries. They refuse to inherit a society of savage capitalism in which workers' rights are undermined in the name of efficiency. They've won the first major victory in what I believe is the great moral struggle of my generation: taming global capitalism.

SOA WATCH WINS A COUPLE (AT LAST)

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