Word: french
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...During the 1990s, the world repeatedly looked on in shock at acts of French rebellion, including the occupation of airport runways by striking Air France workers to stop flights for days, and the paralysis of French highways by protesting truck drivers. Similar dismay resounded abroad at images of French farmers, angered by the import of cheaper goods, capturing trucks from the U.K., Spain, and other European Union countries and dumping or burning their cargo - which often included live animals...
...suburban riots of 2005, however, the ethnically diverse, economically disenfranchised project youths behind that violence had adapted France's tradition of politicized insurgency to a pragmatic goal that bossnapping employees are now also pursuing: securing a productive, gainful spot in France's market economy and capitalist society. The French public largely sympathizes: 55% of people in a BVA/Les Echos poll this week said they believe radical protest measures are justified, and 64% think actions like bossnapping should be depenalized because they constitute a last-gasp effort to avoid skyrocketing joblessness...
...French people and their political culture love history and all commemoration of it - to the extent that France often looks to its past as much as it does to its future in responding to its present," says Guy Groux, a specialist in French social and labor conflict for the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris. "Because of that, we're in a political and ideological disconnect, with our egalitarian ideals rooted in past hostility to capitalism and free markets even as our society and economy have become utterly dependent on them...
...Ironically, the weakness of French unions also explains their explosiveness. Less than 8% of French workers belong to a union - a figured dwarfed by averages elsewhere in Europe and even by America's relatively low 14% level. Worse still, small French unions are bitterly divided among themselves and tend to be dislocated from sector to sector. The result, Groux says, is French management often ignores them while preparing for layoffs and remains high-handed once negotiating begins. All that, he says, increases the allure and utility of insurrectional action - and pushes the limits of dramatic protest over time...
...French unions must often stage radical action as a prerequisite for obtaining good faith negotiations that big unions in the U.K. and Germany are granted out of hand, out of management's respect of their power," Groux says. "Meanwhile, unions and protestors turning to radical action here wind up competing with each other for the media coverage that creates - since big press is what creates pressure on bosses and the government to concede. The result is, there's constant obligation to up the ante to ensure protests don't wind up ignored...