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I just heard Chris Burns reporting from Paris on the vainglorious student protests for CNN. Burns fawning reportage suggests he's gone native and may start chucking rocks at French police himself at any moment, but this bit caught my eye in particular.

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[French businesses] want to see someone proving their worth. However, I guess, if you put your mind in some of these youth's minds…they study very hard for very long. They have a degree. And they would like to get a job. They would like to get a job with security. And what is being offered to them is a low-wage job with absolutely no security, no guarantee. The boss can fire them no questions asked in the first two years of that contract. That's absolutely outrageous to a lot of these students who think it's just an insult.

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I don't want to sound like anyone's Dad here, but it seems to me a fair degree of job security can be obtained by working hard and being reliable. After all, who is going to fire a great employee "no questions asked"? Since these complaints are coming from perpetually-on-strike union workers and students who have enough time on their hands to spend the better part of a week hanging out in the streets, they'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical that this is a mass movement to protect their right to work hard and be productive.

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