How About Those French?

All this trouble just because the government wants to relax some of it's regulations on business owners. This is a quick and dirty overview on what's going on. The French have very "progressive" labor laws. Basically once hired the employee owns the job and the employer has to walk a tight line or else be breaking some very strick labor laws. It's almost impossible to fire an employee in France. So what happened was that employers stopped hiring young people without good references and a good work history. Employers didn't want to take the chance of hiring a worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing employee that they couldn't get rid of later. So unemployment for people under 30 in France is high, very high. So the government decided to pass a law that would allow employers to fire anyone under the age of 26 without having to jump through hoops. The hope is that employers would start to hire young people again, thus dropping the unemployment rate. Now if an employer has a hard working 22 year old employee, I don't he's going to fire him for no reason but if he has a 22 year old bum then the employer can toss him out and hire someone else. Sounds like the right thing to do to me. But the French youth don't like it. Not one bit. And so they protest and march and riot.