Protests Escalate In France

At Least One Million Jobs Law Demonstrators Fill The Streets

(CBS/AP) 
Organizers, who said the turnout was in the hundreds of thousands, hoped it would exceed the 1 million who marched last week. The afternoon march in Paris promised to be the biggest, and the city deployed 4,000 police to avert violence that marred previous protests.

Police actively looked to thwart troublemakers. At Paris' Saint-Lazare station, riot officers with weapons and a police dog pulled over train travelers disembarking from the suburbs, searching their bags and checking identities.

Tourists, meanwhile, stood bewildered before closed gates at the Eiffel Tower. Parisian commuters flattened themselves onto limited subway trains. Garbage bins in some Paris neighborhoods stood overflowing and uncollected by striking sanitation workers.

Irish budget airline Ryanair canceled all its flights in and out of France.

The strike appeared weaker, however, than last week's action. Signs of a possible breakthrough began to emerge as labor leaders suggested they could hold talks with lawmakers after Tuesday's demonstrations.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin devised the disputed "first job contract" as a bid to boost the economy and stem chronic youth unemployment. He maintains it would encourage hiring by allowing employers to fire workers under 26 during their first two years on a job without giving a reason.

The measure is meant to cut a 22 percent unemployment rate among youths that reaches 50 percent in some poor, heavily immigrant neighborhoods. Villepin has cited the national statistics agency as saying it would create up to 80,000 new jobs at zero cost to the state.

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

Americans may consider job security a luxury, but Cobbe reports the French are used to it — and young people don't understand why older workers should be given it, but not them.

Chirac stepped in Friday to order two major modifications, reducing a trial period of two years to one year and forcing employers to explain any firings, in hopes of defusing the crisis. In so doing, he dealt a blow to Villepin, his one-time top aide and apparent choice as successor next year.

In an apparent first in France, Chirac signed the original measure into law this weekend, as promised, but also effectively suspended it with an order that it not be applied. The 73-year-old president's legal sleight of hand kept the law alive while a new version is in the works.

Now that the law has been signed, protesters have less maneuvering room. The government appeared to be hoping that protests would die down after Tuesday's big event and was looking to possible talks between more moderate unions and lawmakers led by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarkozy, a leading presidential hopeful, is the only senior government official unscathed by the crisis.

The head of the governing UMP party's bloc in parliament, Bernard Accoyer, told reporters he had invited labor leaders to talks.

Two labor leaders, CFDT union chief Francois Chereque and CGT union chief Bernard Thibault, suggested they would attend. But both said they hoped the law eventually would be rejected.