François Hollande blinks on labor bill after protests

French president to water down reform bid: report.

François Hollande is preparing to scale back a controversial labor reform bill ahead of a meeting with trade unions Monday, as the government tries to head off further protests, Le Journal du Dimanche, a weekly French newspaper reported on Sunday.

Tens of thousands of students and trade union members rallied across France last week to protest the bill, which aims to ease hiring and firing rules, limit severance pay for dismissed workers and make working-time rules more flexible.

As the French president and his embattled prime minister, Manuel Valls, prepare to meet with unions, the JDD reported that they were going to offer unions a series of concessions on the bill. While the moves won’t be a total climb-down, they will row back significantly from an original text that economists had praised as bold and long overdue.

Among the concessions, the government will no longer impose strict limits on severance pay for dismissed workers — a key issue for firms which complain that they have no idea how much they can end up paying at the end of an arbitration process.

The socialist government may also give magistrates more latitude than originally intended to evaluate the health of a firm trying to fire workers. In France, a judge can block dismissals if he or she deems that the firm is making money in other locales, or even in other countries.

Originally, the text aimed to limit the evaluation of the firm’s status to a single location. Now, it may be expanded to include the firm’s activities across France.

The government is jettisoning plans to liberalize conditions for young workers on training, which is seen as distinct from the bill’s core objectives.

The moves would mean Hollande and Valls will  be making a tactical retreat on measures where they believed they had wiggle room.

However, unions — including the major reformist CFDT group — want the severance pay and business health changes abandoned completely, hinting at further grappling over the bill’s substance, and a possible continuance of major protests. Students and unions have called for more rallies on March 17 and 31.

While the first round of protests was relatively modest, with less than 500,000 people attending, further rounds that bring more people into the streets could put major pressure on Hollande to scrap his bill. The socialist leader faces a re-election battle next year and is trying to navigate a narrow route between sticking to his promise to keep reforming, and trying not to permanently alienate the left-wing supporters who brought him to power.

The European Commission and France’s neighbors, notably Germany, are watching his actions closely. France is struggling with chronically high unemployment and has a reputation of being unreformable — a stigma that has weakened Paris’ voice in Brussels and plagued generations of French leaders.

Unions will clarify their positions on the bill after meeting with Valls Monday. Any suggestion that they are doubling down presages a deepening of the conflict, additional protests, and a potential political crisis for Hollande. Factions in his own Socialist Party may very well clash over the labor reform bill as well as another, highly contested bid to strip convicted terrorists of their French nationality.

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