CRASH TALK

Guardian, UK- When the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin warned that there was a risk of revolution in France, it was not just because he wanted to make life difficult for his arch-rival Nicolas Sarkozy. It was also because social unrest is genuinely on the rise. Yesterday thousands of protesters took to the streets - not as many as the millions who protested in March, but this was a respectable turnout, considering that it was the third national protest at the government's handling of the global downturn in four months.

They are not just marching: universities have ground to a halt for three months over attempts to rewrite the terms of employment contracts for lecturers. There has been a wave of "bossnappings", where chief executives arriving at plants to announce layoffs found themselves barred from leaving. There have been commando-style "picnics" in supermarkets, where people feast from shelves shouting "we will not pay for your crisis". The protests are local and apparently spontaneous. Union officials find themselves not so much leading the action as trying to head it off. In five out of seven cases, bossnapping was used against foreign-owned companies (Sony, Caterpillar, 3M) which are reputed to be more cavalier about laying off workers than their French counterparts. Nor are strikes mere stunts. They represent a widespread feeling that if the president can pay billions to preserve the boss class, and their shares, he should do the same to protect workers. . .

France has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the developed world, with about one quarter of its 2.5 million unemployed under the age of 25.

Unsilent Generation - For more than a century, a main tenet of big business has been to prevent union participation in the organization and management of industrial production. The idea that the UAW could actually take part in setting the priorities of one of the big three automakers has been unthinkable, and all such earlier efforts by the union have been effectively crushed.

As Harold Meyerson succinctly wrote in the Washington Post last December: "In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution - not just the most farsighted union - in America." Meyerson continues:

Even before he became UAW president, Reuther and a team of brilliant lieutenants would drive the Big Three's top executives crazy by producing a steady stream of proposals for management. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Reuther, then head of the union's General Motors division, came up with a detailed plan for converting auto plants to defense factories more quickly than the industry's leaders did. At the end of the war, he led a strike at GM with a set of demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM's board.

"We are the architects of America's future,"Reuther said at the UAW's 1947 convention. It was actually the UAW that first promoted the idea of a small car, exactly 50 years ago. The union's research department set forth its plan in a 1949 pamphlet entitled "A Small Car Named Desire.'' As Meyerson writes, the pamphlet "suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently." But because the union had no real role in the management of the auto industry, it got nowhere. And as Meyerson pointed out on the American Prospect, the UAW subsequently became more insular and short-sighted in the face of foreign competition and downsizing, and "stood shoulder to shoulder with management in opposing decades of bills that would have raised fuel-efficiency standards."