In France, New Review of 35-Hour Workweek
By Liz Alderman, NY Times, Nov. 26, 2014
PARIS--On a recent weekday, Ahlem Saifi caught a 5 a.m. Métro to get to her job as a passengers’ assistant at Orly Airport, where she often works 44 hours a week--well over France’s official 35-hour workweek.
That afternoon, she took a quick lunch break then headed to her second job, as a sales manager at the French hypermarket Carrefour, ending her day at 9 p.m.
“France has a reputation for having lazy workers,” said Ms. Saifi, 26. “But I’ve never worked just 35 hours. That would be like resting on my laurels.”
More than a decade after it was introduced, the 35-hour workweek still projects an image of France as being one of the most laid-back places in the world to work. In most of the rest of the eurozone, the 40-hour workweek is standard.
But in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law.
All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Now, a fight has broken out within President François Hollande’s Socialist government over whether to officially end the nominal 35-hour workweek as a way to overcome France’s economic malaise.
Breaking a taboo, Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron has begun to openly question whether the measure--which was passed in 2000 by a Socialist government to encourage job creation--still serves the country’s needs.
Tensions rose sharply after Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, reported on Sunday that a German-French action plan, prepared for Mr. Macron and his German counterpart, Sigmar Gabriel, would call for overhauling the 35-hour week. After a storm of protest, French officials this week sought to calm fears that a major change was underway.
The report, which is to be made public on Thursday, “does not call into question” the current workweek, they said, although the government does see room for more flexibility within the framework of the law.
Last week, Mr. Macron, an economic centrist, told Parliament that the 35-hour rule had for too long painted France as “a country which no longer wanted to work,” sending a negative signal to foreign companies wanting to invest here. Given France’s economic challenges, Mr. Macron said, the 35 hours “should no longer be put on a pedestal.”
His remarks provoked an immediate backlash within his Socialist Party and among trade union officials, who accused the government of threatening to tear down a totem of the French state that many still cherish.
For wage earners like Ms. Saifi, political resistance to change seems out of touch with economic reality. “We should really be encouraging people to work more if they want to--not the opposite,” she said.
The law has not improved an unemployment rate that, at 10.2 percent, hovers near a high. Nor does it address a deeper challenge in the French workplace: the rising use of part-time contracts, which employers increasingly use to avoid the risk of paying costly overtime.
Ms. Saifi would rather work full-time at Carrefour, where she is replacing a worker on leave. But so far she has been able to obtain only a part-time contract. Meanwhile, the 35-hour workweek rules--despite the loopholes--require her airport employer, Groupe 3S, to cap her maximum working time at 44 hours a week, limiting her earnings there.
“The 35 hours was an intellectual and economic mistake,” said Dominique Moïsi, a senior adviser at the French Institute for International Affairs, an influential research group. “For Mr. Macron to say that he can touch that Holy Grail is very antagonistic to the French left. But it is a way of telling the outside world and the rest of Europe, we should reform France.”
