PARIS: French students take to the streets at the drop of a hat but a long strike that has crippled universities shows they are deeply worried about job prospects. Three quarters of the country’s 84 universities are affected by some form of strike action against the government’s First Job Contract (CPE) law, student unions say, and while that issue is a focus for protest there are wider concerns.

“Getting rid of the CPE isn’t the real objective of the strikers,” said Florence Dupont, a professor of classics at Jussieu, Paris’ biggest university where tens of thousands of students have been on strike for almost a month.

“The real objective is to reject job insecurity ... They don’t want a society with a completely open labour market,” she said.

After a stormy three-hour meeting in a lecture theatre students voted 450-271 to prolong the Jussieu strike and the blockade that enforces it until Friday.

Each morning at dawn, students at Jussieu ram chairs and tables up against the gates of the university in makeshift barricades and hang banners from its walls including one that read: “So many strikes — so many dreams”.

Despite the rhetoric, the concerns of most students who have joined strikes and marched in protest three times in the past week and clashed with police appear far from idealistic.

“I don’t want to find myself two years down the line without a job,” said Arnaud Lobe, 19, who marched through Paris this week.

A place at a state university awaits any young person who leaves one of France’s high schools, or lycees, with a baccalaureate qualification, though many students live at home or work through college because of a lack of student loans.

A university degree should give an advantage in the labour market, but Isabelle, studying for a master’s degree in contemporary theatre at Jussieu, said the fact that so many people go to university devalued the education.

“People who go to the top universities get twice as much money from the government ... We are second class citizens and a degree from a university isn’t worth much,” she said during a break from giving out leaflets to promote the strike.

Few students rallied publicly to the cause of young people who rioted last year in poor suburbs and torched thousands of cars in a campaign against what they said was discrimination, police harassment and lack of job opportunities.

Eddy Laib manned barricades at Jussieu and also took part in the riots — though he insisted he didn’t burn any cars. He said students had a different agenda from last year’s rioters but both groups were angered by the government’s failure to listen.

“People in the (poor) suburbs say that job insecurity and a job is better than nothing and so they don’t take much interest in this movement,” said Laib, 23.

Not all students support the strike. Alexandre Lejeune, a Jussieu computer science student voted against the student blockade at the meeting and said the CPE law should be given a chance — adding that his own views were “mildly right-wing”.

Job security was less of a personal concern since Lejeune hoped to go into I.T. where there was a higher degree of mobility but he said the month-long student protest revealed a deeper problem.

“I think the French malaise is a reality. France is very difficult to reform. The unions represent a part of France that wants to defend its privileges and as a result extreme political parties on both the left and the right are on the rise,” he said.—Reuters