Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: French Youth Protest Labor Law, 03/27/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june06/france_3-27.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is unemployment?

2. What is a strike? What is a general strike?

3. What is a union?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Why are young people protesting in France?

A new French law intended to fix the high youth unemployment rate by making it easier to fire young people has sparked violent protests.

Under the law, employers can fire any worker under age 26 without reason during a two-year trial period of employment.

2. According to the French government, how will the law help students find jobs?

If companies are able to fire young people more easily than older workers, the lawmakers reasoned, employers would be more likely to hire them.

3. What are the students and union leaders threatening to do on Tuesday?

But the measure has angered French university students and trade unions, who have held weeks of protests and demonstrations - some of them violent.

The French government is refusing to back down, however, and now faces a nation-wide strike that could paralyze the city on Tuesday.

"We want to block access to important roads or maybe in shopping malls," said Juliette Griffond, head of a student coordination group, according to Bloomberg news.

"The idea is to be visible. The idea is also to alert the population about the youth movement, to inform them. We want to have an impact on economic life."

"We hope that after the protests the government … withdraws the text," said the opposition Socialist Party's spokesman Julien Dray, Reuters reported. "There is no other solution."

4. What do the students and union leaders want the government to do?

"We hope that after the protests the government … withdraws the text," said the opposition Socialist Party's spokesman Julien Dray, Reuters reported. "There is no other solution."

5. What French leader introduced the law?

The new law, known by its French acronym CPE, was introduced by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is expected to be a presidential candidate in 2007.

6. How does unemployment in France differ from unemployment in the United States?

In France, unemployment for all workers is high - at nearly 10 percent. By comparison, the rate in the United States is around 5 percent.

7. What is the CDI?

The labor situation in France is quite different than in the United States. French labor laws are designed to protect the worker and provide job security. The primary feature is the contract of indeterminate duration - or CDI. Under the CDI, workers are essentially guaranteed a job for life. Although there is a probation period, it is only six weeks. After that, it is very difficult for employers to fire a worker.

8. How does the CDI affect hiring practices?

Alexis Debat, a consultant working at George Washington University, said the labor laws are a drag on France's economy.

"The system is very inflexible, and an employer has to think twice before hiring someone because he knows that this person will have to remain in his or her job regardless of the economic situation, regardless of whether the business situation is good or bad," she told the NewsHour.

"And in many cases, this dilemma is resolved by the employer making the decision not to create a job."

9. Do the French people support the law?

Response to the new CPE law has been largely negative - 63 percent of the French people as a whole disapprove of the law, according to a poll published by the French newspaper Le Monde.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. If you lived in France, would you protest the CPE? Why or why not?

2. The French government has said the new CPE law was proposed largely in response to youth riots in the fall of last year. Read the NewsHour Extra story about last year's riots (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/france_11-09.html) and write an essay explaining how the CPE could help addressed the issues raised during those riots?

3. What is protectionism? What is a free market? Write an essay explaining both and how they apply to this situation.

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.