Creating jobs for youth key challenge for France's new `Joan of Arc'

The French Minister of Employment and Solidarity, Ms Martine Aubry, is responsible for keeping three of Mr Lionel Jospin's most difficult campaign promises: the creation of 350,000 jobs for young people, the reduction of the work week from 39 hours to 35, and the organisation before mid-October of a national conference on employment, salaries and working hours.

The minister slaved away all summer on her draft law on the 350,000 jobs. Ms Aubry's tasks are considered so important that the Prime Minister gave her the rank of Deputy Prime Minister when he formed his Cabinet last June.

L'Express magazine yesterday made her its cover story, calling her "an ambitious woman" and referring to her as "the government's Joan of Arc".

With a quarter of young French people under the age of 26 unemployed, the Jospin government knows solutions are needed urgently. Ms Aubry's text on the "Development of activities for the employment of young people" will be the first to be debated by the National Assembly when it reconvenes on September 16th.

The draft law would create 150,000 jobs for young people by the end of 1998 and 200,000 more by the end of the century. Each annual contract, renewable for five years, will pay the minimum wage, now £740 per month. Ms Aubry's ministry will pick up 80 per cent of the bill - at a cost of £3.88 billion for the first three years - with the remaining 20 per cent being paid by the association, ministry or local authority hiring the young person.

Ten experts drew up descriptions of 22 new job categories for young people, but it is hard to escape the impression that Ms Aubry's make-work scheme will do little to create lasting, meaningful employment. The posts include 75,000 teachers' aides for primary schools, youths to visit old people in retirement homes, escorts to accompany discharged patients from hospitals, mediators between French landlords and their tenants - as if relations between landlords and tenants in France were not complex enough already - and guards for parking lots and shopping malls.

President Chirac has said he approves of the "inspiration" of the Aubry plan, but added that "it must not result in the mass creation of permanent public jobs".

At the forthcoming national conference on employment, Ms Aubry will try to convince business management to create a further 350,000 jobs for young people.

The Socialists promised to reduce the work week to 35 hours, in hopes that this, too, would create new jobs. Management associations are fighting the move, claiming that shorter work hours will make French industry less efficient and create more unemployment.

At the other end of this tangle of irreconcilable promises and demands, the CGT Communist trade union - which has in the past shown its ability to paralyse public transport - says it will fight hard this autumn for big salary increases, a 32-hour week and the creation of even more public sector jobs.

The daughter of the Socialist politician and former president of the European Commission, Mr Jacques Delors, Ms Aubry (47) is on the left of the Socialist Party. She has made enemies within the government, particularly the Finance Minister, Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn. To spite him, she sometimes schedules her press conferences to coincide with his.

Ms Aubry told L'Express she was sorry she had written the preface to a recent book by the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair. "I agreed before I had read the text," she said. "I thought he was much more left-wing."