Don’t sack your workers

CAUSE and effect? Last weekend thousands of banner-waving French workers marched through Paris, denouncing companies such as Marks & Spencer that lay off workers without adequate consultation. Four days later, on June 13th, the National Assembly, in pursuit of “social modernisation”, amended its labour laws to make it still harder for employers to make “economic redundancies”. The minister of labour pronounced herself “very happy”; the leader of the assembly's Communists said the world of work had made “important advances”; and bosses bemoaned the perils of political expediency.