Marketable employees soon in France too?

 The newcomer Emmanuel Macron has now, shortly after the vote, started tackling  what he considers to be the most important economic project :  the deregulation of the labour laws. Doing so he wants to, at last,  follow the German example and perhaps overtake Germany. The project is one of great significance even within the rest of Europe.

 On the one hand Macron wants to largely get rid of the protection from termination of employment so as to simplify the process of dismissal of workers and reduce the cost of redundancies for employers. On the other hand, and this is the core of the project, the object is to break the power of the nationally organized labour unions and the nation-wide validity of the collective bargaining agreements. After the deregulation of labour laws last year it is already possible to decide upon questions of working hours on a factor by factory basis. In future it would be possible to decide upon other matters such as remuneration between the enterprises and employee representatives. The company agreements are to have priority over the national labour laws. Only if a labour union represents more than 50% of the workers would they be allowed to take part in the negotiations at the factory level. If that were to happen, not only would the minority labour unions be left out of the loop, the power of the national labour unions and the scope of the industry-wide wage agreements would have been broken.

 All over the south of the Euro zone the same development. All these countries have to deliver. No, not to their own voters. Those who have been voted in deliver the yield to the investors who expect that yield with the lowest wages. This has little to do with democracy.

 When politicians like Angela Merkel say, Germany has full employment, she doesn´t speak about the big part in these figures of precarious workers as well as the employees without social security.