Deja vu all over again

Ya gotta hand it to those Anglo-Saxons...when ya gotta looming electoral defeat;

French Prime Minster Manuel Valls on Tuesday unveiled a series of reforms aimed at curbing rising unemployment. The measures include relaxing labour laws and giving business owners incentives to hire more staff.

Because;

President François Hollande has pledged not to seek a second term in office in 2017 if he fails to reverse the upward trend in unemployment that has been hovering above 10 percent.

So the government tries, tries again to placate the people who hire the employees.

The measures sought to appease French employers who claim the country’s stiff labour laws discourage them from hiring new workers for fear they won’t be able to fire them, or have to pay big legal fines to former employees.

The government said it will cap the amount of the damages that can be awarded to a staff member found to have been fired unfairly.

Seems we've heard this song before. From a French economist.

Hours after he won the economics Nobel Prize, [Jean] Tirole said he felt “sad” the French economy was experiencing difficulties despite having “a lot of assets”.

“We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches.

France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic” earlier on Monday, arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market.