Jobs protests continue in France

Demonstrators blocked off a French wholesale market and two mail sorting centres in small, scattered protests today that followed a day of massive marches against a youth jobs plan.

Unions and student associations have maintained steady pressure on the conservative government for weeks, demanding the withdrawal of the law that would make it easier for employers to hire and fire young workers. Demonstrations yesterday drew about 1 million people, police said.

Today, protesters in the western city of Nantes stopped traffic around the city’s wholesale meat and produce market for about three hours. In south-western Toulouse, students blocked mail trucks outside two sorting centres to try to disrupt postal delivery.

Most of yesterday’s marches were peaceful, although hooligan violence at the end of the largest demonstration, in Paris, dominated television coverage.

Several hundred youths ripped up street signs and park benches and hurled stones and chunks of paving at police.

The police responded with tear gas and rubber pellets and made repeated charges, carrying away those they arrested.

Police said they took 383 people into custody in Paris, where 30 people and four police officers also suffered slight injuries. Another 243 were arrested elsewhere in France.

As before, the violence appeared to involve many youths from Paris’ tougher suburbs, as well as political extremists.

“It is giving them too much credit to ascribe an ideology to them. These are just hoodlums, who come to break and pillage. I’m not sure there is an ideology behind all this,” said Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Youths also smashed store windows, bus shelters and clashed with police in Rennes in north-west France, while store windows, cars and telephone boxes were damaged in Lille in the north-east.

Police said more than 1 million people poured into the streets in 268 marches across the country, including 84,000 in Paris. Union organisers put the figure in the capital at 700,000 – and 3 million nationwide.

It was the second Tuesday running that unions and student groups mobilised such numbers, even as renewed nationwide strikes lost a little steam compared to a week earlier.

Strikers again shut down the Eiffel Tower, but mail was delivered, more planes and trains were running, fewer teachers stayed off the job and there were fewer disruptions to daily life. The education minister said fewer high schools were closed or disrupted by protesters.

Students backed by unions have spearheaded ever-larger marches for two months against the law.

French President Jacques Chirac signed it on Sunday, saying it will help France keep pace with the global economy. He offered modifications, but students and unions rejected them.

In a sign that the impasse might be easing, major unions agreed to talks today with members of Chirac’s party charged with drawing up his proposed modifications to the jobs law, although labour leaders also said they would hold firm on their demand to scrap the law.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin championed the disputed “first job contract” to stem chronic youth unemployment rates, which run at 22 percent and as high as 50 percent among youths in some depressed, heavily immigrant neighbourhoods hit by weeks of riots last year.

Villepin maintains the measure would encourage hiring by giving employers greater flexibility, allowing them to fire workers under 26 if things don’t work out in their first two years on a job.

Critics say it threatens France’s hallmark labour protections, and the crisis has severely damaged Villepin’s political reputation.