The defeat of the First Employment Contract Law (CPE) in France is a watershed moment in the history of youth struggle. In a matter of weeks, the forces of students’ unions, youth organizations, and trade unions, brought a wretchedly reactionary and discriminatory piece of legislation down. Even now many in the movement continue to fight, as they begin to realize that the strength of the young is not limited to challenging mere scraps of paper, but the system itself. These attacks on youth and student rights are not restricted to Europe, as certainly most young people can attest to in Canada. The rolling back of wages, employment standards and educational access are key portions of the “new world economy” of the neo-liberal “globalizers”. Throughout our school careers, young people are told repeatedly that we are not to expect the same job security, lifestyle, or even the same living conditions that our parents’ generation enjoyed – as if this constant reminder vindicates the last generation of all wrong doing and justifies worsening conditions. What lessons can Canadian students and youth take from the victory of the French student movement?
High school, university and college students alike are now finishing another year of classes and, for the latter two, a year of paying exorbitant amounts for tuition, rent, textbooks and bills. The irony is that even though the cost of education is increasing on all fronts, the likelihood that we will be able to find employment that enables us to pay these costs is evaporating. Student summer workers are a windfall for the capitalists who hire young people often as seasonal workers, doing less desirable work for long hours at low pay, with no overtime and certainly no contract. While in France our brothers and sisters fought against giving bosses the right to fire young people indiscriminately, Canadian employers often already have and exercise that right with impunity. What’s more, the cost of education makes it nearly impossible for us to do anything other than submit to these conditions without a fuss. The current leadership of the student federations must learn the lessons of France, lessons that are glaring examples of the strength of militancy over passivity. They must begin now, to lay the groundwork for a mass struggle and the first step to this end is building links with the working class.
The youth serve, in many ways, an extremely valuable purpose in the class struggle. They are more sensitive to the exploitation of the bosses then even most sections of the workers. Because of this, the youth play the role of a barometer for the class struggle. They become the spark that can ignite the fire for the working class fight. However, if the students and youth do not build links with the working class, they cannot possibly hope to spread their struggle to the workers. The only class capable of leading a revolutionary struggle to change society is the working class; the youth can not lead this kind of struggle on their own. The recent student movements in France and Quebec were both massive victories not just because of the militancy of the students, but because the youth were able to build solid links with the trade unions and the working class. This was the key factor that led to victory.
A new direction is needed for our young people and it starts from the bottom up. As the French example shows, real power does not come from above in the students’ and workers’ organizations, but from the ground with the rank-and-file membership. Students in France were able to link with the powerful force of organized labour and we need to do the same. Militant students need to organize politically, educate themselves and their peers, to build a movement that can replace apathy with struggle and show the bosses and politicians that we are a force to be reckoned with.
