(CA) was aimed at facilitating the hiring of young workers by adapting existing skills to the work setting. Under this scheme, individuals worked for a maximum 6-month period while receiving at least 200 hours of training. The stages d'initiation a La vie professionnelle (SIVP) provided schoolleavers with an initiation into work life to enable them to sample and then choose a career. The pre-training stages lasted for three to six months, with the worker receiving at least twenty-five hours of training a month. Participation in this scheme could lead to a CQ or CA. Under a law of August 1985 governing leave for training, retraining and reemployment, employers undertake to offer such leave to a specific number of wage-earners whose redundancy would have been authorised; during this period the workers concerned will be able to benefit from a number of activities organised to help them find new jobs. A law of January 1985 widened the scope of certain social provisions, including the encouragement of training work experience schemes for young people by setting up introductory apprenticeships and extending the fifth week of annual paid holiday to nursery school assistants. A law of July 1985, while increasing the number of cases in which a firm could use temporary workers and relaxing conditions regarding the duration of certain types of contracts, also introduced changes in the rules relating to the duration of probation periods and made it harder to re-employ temporary workers in the same job before a waiting period has expired, etc. The way in which the occupational health services are organised was modified by two decrees issued in March 1986. The first established regional occupational health committees while the second made important changes to the regulations. A Decree of March 1986 laid down conditions for the approval of organisations conducting atmospheric monitoring and made a French standard on such work compulsory, while a Decree of March 1986 on the information and test results to be provided under the Labour Code introduced in France the European Community testing methods for analysing dangerous substances as well as the OECD "codes of practice" governing the procedures to be followed when conducting these tests. During the early Eighties, the Socialists introduced the "congé de conversion" ("conversion leave"), which received widespread publicity in 1984 when redundancy measures were introduced for the shipbuilding and steel industries. These combined the traditional tool of early retirement for redundant