The French commitment to the thirty-five-hour work week
Carpenter, Luther
EVERYBODY WHO MATTERS—business federations, the business press, economists, conservative governments, Tony Blair, the New York Times—says that Europe (and especially France) has to "reform."...
...IT APPEARS TO have worked...
...Promotions and job training paid for by the enterprise, funds for which are mandated by the government, often cease by age forty-five...
...The real estate bubble and the stock market also have generated a lot of money...
...It's not just a second best...
...The laws tried to avoid raising the total cost of an hour of labor to companies by offering incentives (cuts in social security taxes) to any company that increased hiring by 6 percent while cutting average hours by 10 percent...
...They, too, are victims of the high rate of unemployment, but in a more ambiguous way...
...Civic associations— whose funding was stupidly cut by the government last year—and social workers undoubtedly were part of the crucial riot prevention mechanism...
...Ten percent unemployment, plus or minus a point, maintained for twenty-five years, has had corrosive effects...
...They don't want the young...
...Implementing the norm was a job for collective bargaining (itself a weak spot in French society, and something that the Socialists wanted to encourage...
...we'll have to see whether legislation actually passes...
...Take the total numbers of hours worked by everybody in the economy, divide it by thirty-five hours a week instead of forty, and presto...
...Here, we can see a lot...
...Break with the past, with the French social model, says Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy...
...In 35 heures, des ambitions aux realites, Jean-Louis Dayan reports that the Ministry of Employment's statistical unit estimated that 242,000 net new jobs could be attributed to the thirty-five-hour week...
...Many of them were tired and wanted to leave boring jobs...
...Most companies haven't reopened the issue—so far...
...It takes 2 percent growth just to keep POLITICS ABROAD the existing level of unemployment...
...Jobs had to be created for them, to get them off the streets and integrate them into adult society...
...The smallest employers, who have fewer than ten employees, were exempted...
...This money finds its way into consumer spending, much of which ends up in imported goods, and thereby creates a second huge deficit, in foreign trade...
...Of course, these jobs would be subsidized (nothing gets done without subsidies...
...Consequently, job redistribution must continue...
...By age fifty-five or sixty, most of them have retired...
...They really didn't want to hire workers for forty hours, and they were satisfied not to pay more per hour...
...As steel mills, coal mines, textile factories, and other heavy industries shrank, unemployment inched up...
...Mass unemployment lengthens the waiting line for jobs...
...It didn't try to destroy the unions and the rights of workers...
...French workers worked long hours, and France imported labor...
...By the mid-1990s, conservative politicians had reconsidered...
...And older workers were willing (often grudgingly) to give up their jobs in the name of solidarity...
...Rules governing overtime hours were made more "flexible" (the mantra of the employers' federation and free-market economists), in particular allowing more compensatory time instead of pay...
...Only the besteducated young graduates in areas such as the sciences get a real job before they are twentyfive...
...Job redistribution has been the main line of defense against these corrosive effects...
...The latest prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, has clearly drawn this conclusion...
...The company argued that workers could quit there, because the unemployment rate was lower...
...Thus, blue- and white-collar workers "paid" for part of their new leisure...
...The exclusion of England shows that the company didn't have to increase its hours, but it wanted to decrease its labor costs by 15 percent overall...
...Job redistribution is essential to the functioning of the French welfare state at this time...
...By 2001, about half of the employees in the private sector (seven million) and all in the public sector (five million) were covered by an agreement to reduce hours...
...When the conventional wisdom is unanimous, as John Kenneth Galbraith warned, we have to be wary...
...What appeals is a kind of existential feeling, a desire for energy and expansiveness, lavishness and irrational exuberance, change for its own sake, in any direction, out of restlessness and fear of stagnation...
...They were designated as such when the first form of job redistribution began in 1974: systematic early retirement...
...A company could choose to stay at thirty-nine hours...
...More rapid growth led to more imports...
...Employers had an opportunity to modernize their use of labor and become more competitive in a more sophisticated way instead of simply downsizing...
...The state wanted to give the first claim on whatever jobs continued to exist to the young...
...His government has offered several new forms of it...
...The burning of cars and some public buildings (a theater, some social centers, day care centers, gyms, even a post office or two) spread all over—but was less in Marseille, where the youth unemployment rate is better...
...Employers didn't like older workers and were willing to pay higher social insurance taxes to get rid of them...
...The turning point was the "silent depression" that started in 1974...
...Speed-up and having to do different kinds of tasks resulting in stress caused much of the discontent, not pay...
...It was at 4 percent by the end of 1975, over 7 percent at the time of the 1981 elections, over 9 percent 28 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 in 1984...
...French "reformers" have gone after every social benefit, including basic social security pensions and health insurance...
...more full-time jobs...
...And they don't want people from the Paris working-class suburbs, people with names that sound Algerian or Arabic...
...From this point of view, the thirty-five-hour week and early retirement are perverse...
...job redistribution grew belatedly into an important element of the French welfare state...
...Only the United States is exempt from a balance of payments crisis, because all the other countries of the world count on the United States to be the "consumer of last resort" for their exports...
...It manages it...
...Choosing domestic service as an employment priority means that the government really doesn't see much demand for other kinds of services or much potential for other job-creating economic growth...
...Ca bouge a droite"—something's shaking on the right...
...The idea of "getting moving" has a definite appeal...
...The most obvious is that the current American growth model is based on stimulating demand through tax cuts that have created huge federal budget deficits...
...The minister of social cohesion, JeanLouis Borloo, has another pet project...
...The laws had stipulated that workers at the minimum wage could not have their pay packet decreased...
...They frustrate those who want to start work earlier, work more hours, and go on working later...
...All but one French union agreed, because the workers clearly feared that the two French factories would be closed if they didn't...
...it's part of the middle-class comfort that the French want to distribute to all...
...The company promised to make substantial modernizing investments and to guarantee the jobs until 2012, and not to build a factory in Eastern Europe...
...Leaving aside questions of what kinds of growth would be desirable, there is no way that Europeans will be allowed to stimulate their economies to generate enough jobs to bring unemployment down from the 10 percent range to the 2 percent level of the 1950s and 1960s...
...The statistical unit also claimed that the results improved the quality of life for some 60 percent of people working in companies with agreements...
...But no other country can run these two deficits...
...Balance of payments problems and inflation offended France's partners in the European Union...
...The "reformers" have nibbled at the most dramatic form, the thirty-five-hour week, but employers haven't done away with it...
...First, job redistribution remains substantial...
...This made a theoretical breach in the system, but Raffarin went too far...
...Until then, they stay in school, piling up credentials, and getting more tense because of the heightened competition in school and in the job market...
...Even the employers' federations didn't want to go so far...
...Third, the level of unemployment hangs over everything...
...It embodies positive values: solidarity, mass comfort, time for leisure and family, and the 1960s slogan of the expansion of the human personality...
...Growth means jobs, and all you have to do is get rid of the obstacles to growth...
...The first attempt to reduce the legal working week stalled in 1982 because of the hostility of the employers...
...However, there are many ways to chip away at the system...
...This situation makes it hard to defend popular benefits against "everybody" and their friends, the French "reformers...
...Legal retirement at sixty with the amount of money that one previously got at sixty-five codified the idea that the young would have first claim on jobs and the "old" would get out of the way...
...Thirty-five hours became the norm but not obligatory...
...They may take apprenticeships or temporary contracts...
...they beg for "lenience" to keep the slow growth they have (France's has actually been higher than Germany's...
...It's part of the safety net and part of the insurance against social unrest...
...Unions were reasonably happy, though they feared that "flexibility" would hurt in the long run...
...Those who never get steady jobs or who lose their jobs can end up in a cycle that runs from long-term unemployment to despair to drink or drugs and on to homelessness...
...Job redistribution doesn't cure mass unemployment...
...Those who make it past these disasters have shortened careers...
...The most aggressive have been ones with fewer ties to the community, such as Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, Bosch...
...Why not go for growth instead...
...In a recent interesting case, detailed in Le Monde on December 30, 2005, a seventeen-factory, German-based company that makes shopping carts and has two factories in France negotiated an increase in working hours from 32 to 35 in production and from 34.5 to 37.5 in the office—with no increase in pay...
...Two particular targets have been early retirement and the thirty-five-hour work week, which are pillars of the French practice of job redistribution...
...His popularity drifted down, and he became a total liability by the time of the referendum that voted down the European Union's Constitution...
...It would allow working men and women to spend more time with their families and to share household tasks...
...small employers could pay only a 10 percent bonus for some of these hours (where larger employers must pay 25 percent...
...Growth was good...
...It is a solution to the corrosive effects of persistent mass unemployment...
...They benefited from the opportunity to modernize, intensified the work process, and took advantage of the subsidies...
...At first, it was limited to getting two groups off the job market: working-class women with children, who received family allowances as an alternative to paid work, and fourteen-tosixteenyear-olds, who had to stay in school...
...It was a win/win solution, if only the employers would cooperate and hire more people, rather than just making those who remained accomplish the same amount in a shorter time...
...Small wonder in this climate that 77 percent of a sample of young people said they would like a civil service job...
...The ministry wrote the laws to meet employers' priorities...
...The more promising idea was to reduce the legal work week to thirty-five hours...
...Employers had to be enticed to take them, through a myriad of forms of apprenticeships and subsidized forms of employment (often in nonprofit services...
...Generally, jobs disappeared rather than being recycled to the young...
...Everybody handles these small employers gently because they are very prickly and hostile to all social legislation...
...He wants to create 500,000 positions in "services to individuals," such as child care, care of the elderly, and cleaning services...
...They discourage effort...
...They waste human beings...
...LUTHER CARPENTER, a member of the Dissent editorial board, is writing Comfort and Peace, A Biography of the French Welfare State...
...Are the proposed sacrifices necessary to the survival and development of the system or are they a way of taking from the weak to give to the strong...
...Most European employers have some understanding of the workingclass concept of solidarity...
...More imports led to balance of payments problems and inflation...
...Early retirement got the "old" out of the way, but wasn't so good at sharing the work...
...It embodies a consensus among the state, business, and unions...
...Employers were also reasonably happy...
...Even if the Euro Zone's limits on deficits were raised, more expansionary policies would lead to more imports and a balance of payments crisis...
...Second, the company's approach was aggressive but not ideological...
...Sarkozy advocated "positive discrimination" even before the riots...
...The unions first agitated for this in the 1970s as a way to share the wealth, productivity, and comfort that thirty years of growth had created...
...France, Germany, and several other nations are currently being brought to task for exceeding these limits...
...To the French, a real job means a full-time one, with the protections of labor law, not an assignment scheduled to vanish in six months...
...Companies are allowed to give vouchers...
...We need to get France "moving," they say...
...One is affirmative action to redistribute jobs, especially civil service jobs, to people from the working-class suburbs, to defuse the anger there...
...They are the donors in the system of job redistribution...
...Job redistribution doesn't cause the problem of unemployment, but it doesn't cure it either...
...Reform" is a polite way of saying that somebody who isn't "everybody" ought to (has to) get less of something...
...The annual allowance for overtime went from 130 hours to 180 (and later 220...
...After the disastrous elections of 2002, the new conservative prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, replaced the thirty-five-hour week with an annual norm of 1,600 hours, which translates to slightly less than forty-six weeks at thirty-five hours...
...In this way, job redistribution became a major component of the welfare state...
...Then there are several new forms of subsidized employment...
...What are the motives of the "reformers...
...The limitations imposed by Europe have existed since the 1970s and were made more formal by the process that established the Euro: a member state may not have a total budget deficit (including social insurance) over 3 percent of GDP a year and an accumulated public debt over 60 percent of GDP...
...That's what the French economy has been generating...
...Over the last thirty years successive French governments have tried to stimulate the economy by raising the minimum wage and increasing its budget deficit (either through public spending or tax cuts...
...When Socialist Lionel Jospin became prime minister in 1997, the minister of employment, Martine Aubry, got two laws passed...
...How important is job redistribution to the welfare state as it now functions...
...It forced similar deals on all its plants except for one in England...
...Since then, measured unemployment has stayed in the 9 percent to 10 percent range, frequently higher and occasionally dipping a few tenths below 9 percent...
...He wants to make this sector of employment less casual, more like real jobs in the French sense...
...Raffarin then promoted a 2005 law that "allowed" companies to negotiate a return to a forty-hour week...
...Last year, unemployment insurance was that "something" in Germany...
...The basic facts are simple...
...The facts confirm this judgment: subsidized jobs appear to account for all the improvement in official unemployment figures since early 2005...
...It would be easy to take the opposite position, the "Italian solution," and leave personal services to the underground economy...
...For purposes of comparison, full-time American workers clock around 1,900 hours annually...
...politicians remember the Poujadist movement of the 1950s...
...There are good reasons not to mess with it (not just inertia, as "everybody" would have it...
...Now a worker can be made to work up to forty-eight hours in one week or forty-four hours a week for a dozen 30 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 weeks—not exactly lazy, and not exactly restricting the "freedom" of the owner...
...It tries to ensure the future of the society by integrating the young into the world of work...
...The value of early retirement packages was reduced in 1979, but early retirement has been a feature of the system ever since...
...32 n DISSENT / Spring 2006...
...Some 90 percent of the workers continued to receive their previous pay, though the laws allowed companies to negotiate smaller wage increases in subsequent years...
...Implicitly, he and "everybody" are saying, "Copy the United States...
...Every time a government pressed the accelerator, it ran into several walls...
...People near retirement age who were laid off for "economic reasons" because a company was downsizing or restructuring could get a combination of benefits that paid them 90 percent of their previous income...
...As minister of social cohesion, Borloo is charged with trying to reduce "exclusion," and he appears to be taking this mission seriously, within the limits of what is politically and economically possible...
...Currently the unions and the main employers' federation, MEDEF, are negotiating over a new form of temporary contract that could be offered to people aged fiftyseven to sixty—the ones that employers don't want but who could be useful to society, the ones who need more years of social security contributions to get their basic pensions to the standard rate...
...Martine Aubry claimed more...
...In turn, these employees will pay the social charges for their service workers, but they are reimbursed by the DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD vouchers, and then the government reimburses the companies—who, of course, receive tax breaks in return—for these services to their employees...
...oNETHELEss, conservative politicians have messed with it...
...Employers have their pick...
...The extra hours can be compensated monetarily or traded for educational leave or compensatory time...
...First, they fine— tuned the law...
...Managers appreciated it most...
...Job discrimination and joblessness in general were factors in the background to the October 2005 riots...
...By far the least satisfied were unskilled women: 40 percent of them said their DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD lives had improved, 40 percent said they'd stayed the same, and 20 percent said their lives were worse...
...THERE ARE MANY reasons why Europe cannot copy the United States...
...But it's not just a pis aller, a second best...
...Employers don't want POLITICS ABROAD the "old" either...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
