Kleenex Citizens and the Performance of Undisposability

Abstract

In March of 2006, student groups throughout France received global media attention for their protests against the contrat première embauche (CPE, or First Employment Contract) sponsored by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. This contract would have permitted French employers to hire workers under 26 for two years without commitment to long-term employment. With CPE, Villepin imagined a solution for France’s high unemployment rate, attributable in some minds to the fact that France has for decades enforced national laws that strongly inhibit the firing of employees. Employers, he argued, would be more likely to hire new workers if they knew that they were easy to fire. Some policy analysts lauded the CPE as a step toward ‘la flexibilité’ in the French system, arguing that such an approach was necessary in order to participate in a rapidly expanding global economy. For protesting students, however, and a different group of social analysts, the CPE was an unfair and selective enforcement of ‘la précarité’ (a lack of job security), a non-reciprocal contract that effectively treated a younger generation as ‘Kleenex’ to be used and disposed.¹ Throughout the month of March, students made their discontent felt by protesting at universities and lycées across the country; their actions recalled in some minds the formative French student protests of 1968. The nature of that recalling varied for different interpreters, however, and it is that difference of interpretation and action that interests me in this chapter.