The Protest on Unemployment: Forms and Opportunities

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, France saw the “return of the social question,” with an (uneasy) alliance between public sector workers, the unemployed, and the marginally employed. In 1995, the extended strike of the cheminots (public transport workers) unexpectedly gained large support from public opinion, as it brought millions into the street in remarkable demonstrations of solidarity across the country, and forged direct organizational and symbolic links between the labor movement and various groups of excluded, including illegal immigrants, unemployed workers, and the homeless, as well as the lycée and university students and an intelligentsia that had been widely dismissed as apathetic and uninterested. (Fantasia and Stepan-Norris 2004: 556) Various marginal groups mobilized in the so-called mouvements de sans on behalf of the “have-nots”: migrants without legal residence permits, homeless people, and the unemployed. Analysts described a coalition between the “moral left” of the middle class that defended human rights, and the “social left” that mobilized the workers. In particular, the unemployed protested in 1997 against a reform that reduced the funding for unemployment compensation and centralized its management. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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