Word: bayou
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beginning about four years ago, Bayou and buddies Manuel Domergue and Lionel Primault identified a handful of specific problems that thousands, if not millions, of people face every day. Then they created groups dedicated to those individual causes, with perhaps a dozen full-time members running each. Every group comes up with creative and often wickedly funny new ways to focus attention to their issue, drawing in supporters and hordes of journalists who don't want to miss a good story. It has proved wildly successful. "What you have is a small number of brilliant people taking up problems that...
Central to the movement is the handful of single-issue collectives Bayou and his fellow activists have founded. Take Black Thursday, which is named - in a wink to the housing crisis faced by thousands of university students and young French workers - for the day France's best-known classified real estate supplement comes out. The group stages high profile squatting campaigns of empty state- and municipal-owned buildings. Last month, for example, 10 Black Thursday squatters theatrically moved out of a disused building for handicapped students they had occupied since January. That's how long it took to get municipal...
Sister collective Generation Precarious has sent dozens of white-masked youths into the shops and offices of some of France's best known companies to denounce firms who use free student interns instead of hiring more workers. Bayou says he first got the idea of founding the association after seeing a cascade of responses to a single Internet forum post lamenting such abuse. Though Generation Precarious only has 10 full-time members, its demonstrations, advertised over e-mail and via social media sites, attract hundreds. Two years of protests pushed the government to decree that companies must pay interns...
...little wonder that the new protest movement is growing in popularity. "We had little choice but to step into that void and get something done ourselves, because it was clear we were going to be left to rot as these older forces focused on their usual agendas," Bayou says. While unions are the movement's natural allies, organized labor is not the answer: "Unions represent less than 5% of the workforce, and average member age is over 50. And, unlike us, they tend to be morose, boring, preachy - and usually lose...
...Bayou, Delli and their friends say they're not out for revolution, or even to impose their philosophy. They suggest changes not from any deep-seated ideological position but to get people talking. They want in on the game like everyone else, they say - only in a viable, sustainable way. They want to help everyone from average middle-class folk to the marginalized residents of France's blighted housing projects. Delli, who grew up in a poor area herself, says that's why the movement cuts across class and racial lines. "Our array of single-issue causes actually looks more...