Via Samizdata, this Reuters piece describing how young French people are embittered by the system which makes employing people so expensive that employers take on new young staff only on temporary contracts:

"There’s a war of generations and strong competition between the different age groups," he added.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, the unemployment rate for French workers aged between 15 and 24 was 21.2 percent, having steadily risen in the course of the year. This was three times the jobless rate for those aged from 25 to 49, which stood at 7.4 percent. For workers over 49, it was 5.2 percent.

With the French economy estimated to shrink by 1.2 percent in the first three months of this year, according to a Reuters poll, companies are likely to lay off more temporary staff and invest less in training.

Is the so-called European Social Model dividing the continental EU workforce into two segments? People effectively unsackable, and people whom no-one dare employ because if they are employed they become effectively unsackable?

In this gloom a ray of hope. Our deadly enemy the Working Time Directive is struggling:

Negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on revising the EU’s rules on working time have collapsed, with both sides blaming the other…

The two sides were unable to reach agreement on whether or not to set a date for phasing out national opt-outs from the EU’s 48-hour maximum working week and on whether the time that doctors and other workers spend on-call should be counted as working time.

… It is the first time since the Amsterdam treaty took effect in May 1999 that conciliation negotiations between the Parliament and Council have failed to reach a deal.

More:

Both the Czech presidency and the European Commission said that the failure to reach a deal would lead to a worse situation for workers in Europe. Špidla said that more member states were likely to apply opt-opts to the 48-hour week, thus weakening workers’ protection. “The bigger the number of countries using the opt-out, the more difficult it will be to get rid of this exception in the future,” Ne