French students protest against job laws

Thousands of students marched through Paris and blockaded universities across France as their revolt against the Government over a controversial new youth employment law intensified.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has staked his reputation, and possibly his job, on a measure that aims to cut rampant youth unemployment with two-year contracts that enable employers to sidestep rigid French labour laws and fire young workers without reason.

This means the controversial new law would loosen France's labour code and allow companies to fire job-seekers under 26 within two years of hiring them, without giving cause or shelling out the restrictive severance payments usually due when an employee is laid off.

Bloomberg reported that in scenes reminiscent of the student protests in the 1960s, police stormed the Sorbonne on March 11 to evict 200 students who had occupied the university in the heart of Paris's Latin Quarter.

Several hundreds of youngsters clashed with the police on Tuesday in Paris, after they occupied the College de France, one of the country's most prestigious research institutions. The police cleared them away in the night.

The University of Nanterre, one of the largest in Paris, was occupied by 250 students and professors, who took over one of the college's largest amphitheatres.

Time.Com reported this:

The government rammed the law through parliament last week under special emergency procedures, and now students and unions are demanding its full retraction. Meant as a bold symbol of the government's resolve to take a new
approach, the law is proving a rallying point for opponents of the conservative
government, which is looking tired and tattered just over a year away from presidential elections in May 2007.

Sorbonne history student Leonardé Roche, 22, says the measure will make it even easier for French employers to deny job security to youth who already spend years shuffling between unpaid internships and short-term contracts.

"The opposition is growing, and not just among students," he says.

Hundreds of students gathered outside the Sorbonne University in Paris where riot police evicted sit-in students at the weekend. The Sorbonne was the birthplace of a 1968 uprising that shook France.

Here are some agencies' photographs of the clash between the students and French riot police.