The unemployment is part of the system. Without the threats of cheap replacement the employees would hold power.

Sure, but obviously France does not need more workers, given that statistic.

I agree, but how would you propose to lower the number of potential workers in France? For context, Macron tried to push the retirement age up, thus increasing the pool of potential employees.

This is of course a hard question. One step certainly would be to encourage French companies to hire and train their own population.

I don't think pushing up the retirement age matters too much for youth unemployement, as those two groups compete for very different jobs (no 60+ year old will start vocational training as a nurse).

"How do we make the economy good" is obviously an extremely hard problem. I think a very important question is whether the 17% are actively seeking for jobs or considering themselves already entirely removed from the system.

France has a large industrial base, with many, many large companies (and suppliers for those companies), training people to have skills relevant to those companies seems an important consideration.

You can have unemployment as well as a worker’s shortage. You can have lots of need for nurses and carpenters, and also have lots of young people not qualified for those jobs who don’t have other prospects.

>You can have lots of need for nurses and carpenters, and also have lots of young people not qualified for those jobs who don’t have other prospects.

If that is the case you don't actually need more workers, but you have a very serious issue with young people leaving society and either by choice or circumstance not entering vocational training.

You do not need a 5 year degree to become a carpenter or nurse, if your country has a lack of those AND a significant unemployed youth population, the solution is obvious. Importing workers for those roles, just means that you are removing those training opportunities from your own population.

So France's problem is that it can't deal with an influx of immigrants skilled enough to put French youth out of work?

When you see the immigrants sociopaths, no wonder. France gives plenty of opportunities, 1st generation of Magreb migrants were hardworkets, but something broke during the 80s/90s, maybe because they couldn't spend enough times with their parents, these generations hanged around and created a social vaccum filled with religion and antofrance sentiment. Now this generation has kids as well, and will continue this echo chamber and a race to bottom while claiming it's all the fault of the country they live in.

But are those unemployed youth willing to do the available jobs for the pay offered?

This has been a significant problem in the UK since brexit for farmers⁰: local workers are not willing to do that sort of work for that little pay¹ so the reduced availability of migrant workers has meant some crops simply went un-picked because the farmers were unable to afford to offer more³.

In other parts of the employment market where significant learning/experience is required before starting, there potentially are a different set of difficulties meaning jobs go unfilled despite there being unemployed people otherwise available.

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[0] and others offering seasonal or otherwise temporary physical work

[1] and/or in many cases unable to do it as fast² increasing costs to the employer

[2] though that problem would fix itself in time with practise, if people at least started the job

[3] as they'd have to swallow the cost on already miniscule margins in many cases, to the point where wasting part of a crop is financially better than paying more so they don't have to

That should sort itself via the magic of the markets - either there is demand and the price should increase and the pay should rise, or there is no demand, and farmers will produce less, maybe some will close. The latter is a contraction, but there is no god commandment to keep prices low via immigrant work.

The upper class will complain about the "debasement of money" if you do that.

Do what? Let the market function?

Upper class does not care about price of food.