France to subsidize jobs for young people

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | AUGUST 21, 2012

The government led by Francois Hollande will offer subsidized employment to young people for periods that will vary between one and three years.

The French Minister of Labour, Michel Sapin, has indicated that the French government will launch the program called “future jobs” for young unemployed and will subsidize those jobs from the state budget.

The program consists of temporary job positions for anyone who is unemployed with the objective to “further their training and integration,” said Sapin in an interview with the radio station ‘Europe 1′.

The minister has defended the initiative, despite its cost to public finances because “is one of the priorities for 2013″ and also despite the government ‘s alleged commitment to reduce the deficit, specifically limiting it to 3 % of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) next year. Such a goal is seen as far fetched since France is not giving any signs of economic growth or significant recover. In fact, France together with Italy and Spain are countries which are seriously struggling to make their sovereign debt payments.

In that regard, Sapin has emphasized that markets have confidence in France as it shows that those who lend money “are even willing to lose some money.” France has echoed petitions by other European nations to get some kind of deficit amnesty in order to keep afloat due to their lack of capacity to meet their obligations.

Sapin believes that the latest French debt auction helps support his vision, because some of the purchases of short-and mid-term bonds were awarded negative interest rates. He has emphasized that the problems of unemployment — 4.3 million unemployed — can not be resolved quickly, and that it is a problem his government inherited from the previous administration.

With this move, France intends to avoid the unemployment debacle seen in other countries such as Greece and Spain, where the number of people without a job has pushed the rates over 24 percent for the young. In the case of Spain, people are calling the current generation of young, educated men and women as the “lost generation” whose member are unable to find work despite their academic achievement or experience.

With the start of the subsidized employment program, France to keep at least part of its population from starting popular protests to the austerity measures adopted by the government. “It is not enough to change the president or Congress” said Sapin before recognizing that France needs to adopt emergency measures such as “futures contracts” and proposed “deep reforms”.

The measures announced by Sapin include seeking funding for social programs “that does not penalize the companies competitiveness,” he added. It is important to remember that France recently passed a 75 percent increase in taxes for people earning just over $1 million a year as part of the policies to collect more money to finance the state’s increasing expenses.