WHEN the president and the prime minister of France, earlier this month, rescinded a law that had provoked a series of mammoth protests by students and workers, they were widely excoriated in the West. Jacques Chirac, most commentators suggested, had by this act further sullied his legacy. What’s more, his favoured successor, Dominique de Villepin, no longer stood any chance of a reasonable stab at the presidency in next year’s elections.

One can only wonder whether the critics would have shouted words of encouragement from the sidelines had Chirac and de Villepin stood firm in the face of mounting unrest, refusing to budge an inch. Or would their obduracy have been blamed for inciting violence and risking a repetition of the May 1968 revolt?

One would have thought that responding to an extra-parliamentary expression of the popular will was a reasonably democratic thing to do. After all, if people in large numbers take to streets in, say, Lebanon or Liberia and the government of the day refuses to heed their concerns, it stands a reasonably good chance of earning a rebuke from the self-ordained guardians of democracy. But what good are principles if they can’t be twisted to suit your strategic or ideological interests?

If Chirac and de Villepin had legislated improved working conditions for the average person and had subsequently changed their minds after receiving deputations from employers’ representatives, they would in all likelihood have been acclaimed for seeing the light. They are being denounced as losers because they did the opposite: having instituted, with almost no parliamentary debate, a law that took away young workers’ rights, they cancelled it after trade unions and students’ organisations made it clear that they considered it unacceptable.

The Contrat Premiere Embauche (CPE), or First Employment Contract, which became law on April 2, allowed employers a two-year trial period for employees aged under 26. During this period, it would have been legal for employers to cancel the contract at any time, without an explanation. The ostensible intention behind introducing this insidious clause was to reduce unemployment among the youth: at 23 per cent, it’s almost twice the national average, and in poorer suburbs it is said to be closer to 50 per cent.

Among the gravediggers of the welfare state, one of the key mantras is ‘labour market flexibility’; the chief ingredients of this concoction are lower wages and sharply reduced job security. Since last year, French businesses that employ less than 20 people already have the right, with no age limit, that de Villepin sought to extend to all businesses in the case of under-26-year-olds. One of his excuses was last November’s riots in the banlieus — the deprivation-stricken suburbs on the fringes of French cities, inhabited largely by minorities.

Reducing youth unemployment is, of course, a laudable goal, but how you go about it makes all the difference. If reducing school-leavers and university graduates to a cheap, disposable workforce is deemed to be the ideal means of accomplishing this end, this is proof of a profound systemic malaise. But that should hardly come as a big surprise: the demise of the primary alternative made it more or less inevitable that capitalism’s fangs would become more prominent — and that capitalists would no longer be afraid to use them.

Another unfortunate side-effect of the extinction of Soviet-style command economies has been the opportunity to propagate the impression that their failure somehow validates capitalism and unequivocally establishes its superiority. That is nonsense, but it is widely accepted nonsense. And this helps to explain why French workers and students have this month been agitating on behalf of the status quo — in stark contrast to their predecessors in 1968, who were determined to change the world.

Their inclination towards clinging on to the vestiges of a mixed economy may invite pathos, but their resistance to change is also understandable. Because, through much of the West, change tends to be for the worse. The seemingly benign term ‘market reform’ contains within it brutal mechanisms for profit maximisation that would have sparked revolts, if not revolutions, three or four decades ago. Nowadays too many people take in their stride the whittling away of long-cherished rights.

There was barely a squeak, let alone a strike call, when the Australian government earlier this year introduced a raft of industrial relations regulations aimed at making life simpler for employers and more tenuous for employees — enabling, for instance, businesses employing up to 100 people to sack workers more or less at will. That’s why the French resistance, notwithstanding its limited and purely economistic aims, is a healthy sign.

The fact that it led to a small victory for young workers (and, by all accounts, a big defeat for Chirac and de Villepin) can be construed as a bonus. France, of course, has a long tradition of agitation: although people power doesn’t often produce the desired results, the French are usually willing to have a go. The same could be said of innumerable other countries — but there are also places in this world where the strictest measures are in place to ward off the threat of unrest. And when these preventive measures fail to work, you can be reasonably certain that conditions have truly become intolerable.

The UAE — and Dubai in particular — has for decades been a magnet for workers from the subcontinent, chiefly because of the prospect of higher wages, regardless of the working conditions and sometimes mediaeval terms of the contracts. Labour unions have thus far been specifically outlawed, and even informal attempts at collective bargaining have usually entailed en masse dismissal. Not to put too fine a point on it, workers haven’t been allowed many rights, and those on the lowest rungs of society’s ladder — construction workers and other manual labourers — have had to put up with egregious wrongs.

Dubai’s building spree has accelerated over the past decade or so, and the lust for architectural marvels — ranging from an underwater luxury hotel and indoor snowfields to the world’s tallest tower, Burj Dubai — has spurred demand for workers. However, a ready supply, mainly from India and Pakistan, means wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, and working conditions remain dire.

But something has changed. Organised protests among the foreign workforce have hitherto been all but unknown because of the fear of dismissal and deportation. However, last month, workers at the Burj Dubai site went on strike over pay and working conditions, including overtime and medical care. An outbreak of violence resulted in damage estimated at $1 million. Then labourers working on a new terminal building at Dubai airport downed tools in sympathy.

A week later, the UAE announced it would allow labourers to form unions — or at least one union, ‘with separate representatives for the construction, fishing, agriculture and other industries’. What’s more, ‘The law will control how strikes will be conducted. It will outline rights, the do’s and don’ts.’ One could be forgiven for suspecting that there will be more don’ts and do’s, and it remains to be seen whether this gesture produces any results.

On the face of it, the move is a small step in the right direction. It’s proximity to the Burj Dubai strike may, however, be little more than a coincidence. The UAE is said to have been under gentle pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to improve conditions for labourers — and one can only imagine how depressing the situation must have been for institutions such as these to intervene on behalf of the workers.

Then there is the small matter of a Human Rights Watch report, which recently accused the UAE of treating underpaid foreign labourers as “less than human”, and noted that increasing protests reflected withheld wages, hazardous working conditions and filthy living quarters. The UAE dismissed the report as ‘misguided’, but the effort to make amends — at least superficially — indicates a desire to improve the country’s international image.

That’s easier said than done in a tiny country where such yawning disparities of wealth — an unavoidable byproduct of unrestrained capitalist growth — are on display. Measures that could effectively narrow this obscene gap tend to be seen as disincentives to investment. That is why there is good reason to be sceptical about meaningful changes in a system that delivers 17 per cent growth — phenomenal by any standard — but simultaneously guarantees that its benefits flow exclusively to the wealthy.

Next to nothing can reasonably be expected to trickle down for as long as it’s the hands with diamond rings that control the gilded taps. Meanwhile, the organisers of the Burj Dubai disruption live in fear of reprisals. Official sources have hinted that left-wing troublemakers from India and Pakistan are responsible for stirring up the labourers; if that is indeed the case, the agitators deserve our gratitude for breaking through the stultifying docility that had hitherto been the norm.

Dubai’s towers of glass and steel and gold have been raised on the toil and sweat of South Asian workers — who in some cases aren’t allowed inside the buildings once they are complete. They have every right to demand higher wages and improved living conditions. But, hopefully, one day they’ll realise that they deserve a lot more than that.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com