Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The misunderstood French welfare state
- 2 Corporatist welfare states: the residue of the past, or the wave of the future?
- 3 The “treason of the intellectuals”: globalization as the big excuse for France's economic and social problems
- 4 France's break with socialism
- 5 Persisting inequalities
- 6 The protected people
- 7 The excluded: immigrants, youth, women
- 8 The French exception
- Appendix: Some major pieces of social legislation, France 1893–2003
- Notes
- Index
7 - The excluded: immigrants, youth, women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 The misunderstood French welfare state
- 2 Corporatist welfare states: the residue of the past, or the wave of the future?
- 3 The “treason of the intellectuals”: globalization as the big excuse for France's economic and social problems
- 4 France's break with socialism
- 5 Persisting inequalities
- 6 The protected people
- 7 The excluded: immigrants, youth, women
- 8 The French exception
- Appendix: Some major pieces of social legislation, France 1893–2003
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I cannot count the number of times I have heard the same litany of complaints in the course of my conversations with shopkeepers, artisans, and the directors of small businesses: “Of course, I could expand, take on one or two young workers. But I won't do it. Too expensive. Too complicated.”
The center-Right politician Pierre Lellouche, 1998.Things are booming at the moment, but I'll do anything to avoid taking on more workers.
A building contractor in Lille, 1999.With the spread of youth unemployment and poverty, the implicit acceptance by the popular classes and a good part of the middle classes of a certain period of personal sacrifice in exchange for a better future for the younger generation, seems to have evaporated.
Sociologist Jean-Marie Pernot, 1998.The spoiled children of May 68 [those born during the 1940s] have traversed the crisis [the crisis of unemployment of the 1980s–90s] practically unscathed, as if they still lived under the sign of the trente glorieuses. The growth escalator stopped as soon as the generation born after 1955 tried to get on board.
Bernard Préel, middle-aged author of the book, Le choc des générations (2000).Millions of young people remain trapped in the unemployment and underemployment ghetto. Hundreds of thousands of youth of North African descent, especially young women, have never had the chance to work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- France in CrisisWelfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980, pp. 176 - 211Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004