More than 14 years after the law fixing a 35-hour working week was introduced in France, the fiery debate over this emblematic reform of the 1997-2002 socialist government of prime minister Lionel Jospin continues to occupy the political centre stage. While the Right accuses it of being at the heart of many of the problems encountered by the French economy, the law is now also contested among some of the ruling Socialist Party’s ranks.
The broad terms of the law, introduced in February 2000, is that full-time, mostly blue-collar employees, have a maximum working week of 35 hours after which they are entitled to overtime payment. The situation is less clear-cut among white-collar, mostly managerial staff, who are compensated for working beyond 35 hours with days off negotiated in separate company agreements.
Interviewed by French weekly magazine Le Point shortly before his appointment as economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, previously an advisor to President François Hollande, called for businesses to be allowed to re-negotiate with labour unions exemptions to weekly minimum working hours on a case-by-case basis. Since becoming minister, he has urged an easing of the law’s terms of application, saying that he regretted the 35-hour week had given foreign investors the impression “that the French no longer wanted to work”.
However, speaking on the France 2 TV channel earlier this month, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who as an opposition socialist MP in 2011 spoke publicly of his support for introducing an increase of the 35-hour week “by two or three hours”, pledged the law would remain untouched. “There will be no placing into question of the 35-hour week,” he said.
For almost 15 years, the 35-hour week has been central to political debate in France. Its supporters argue that it shows how the state can take effective action to create employment, while its detractors charge it with having weakened French industry, causing a rise in employment costs when those in Germany fell, and it has even been held up as a symbol of the supposedly work-shy attitude of French employees.
At the request of Members of Parliament (MPs) from the centre-right UDI party, the National Assembly in June set-up a cross-party commission of enquiry into ‘the relative societal, economic and financial impact of the reduction in working hours'. The commission’s members questioned dozens of experts and former government members during 37 separate hearings. Their findings were the subject of a report published earlier this week and which was approved by 12 of the commission’s 16 members.
The report, which was authored by Socialist Party MP Barbara Romagnan, the commission’s rapporteur, concluded that the introduction of the 35-hour working week was “the most effective and least costly policy in favour of employment that had been carried out since the 1970s”. However, the findings are far from all-positive, and some expert testimony given to the commission questioned the law’s effects in the long term.
The report is unlikely to calm a debate that has become so politically entrenched. UDI party MP Thierry Benoît, president of the commission, voted against approval of the report’s findings. He told Mediapart that he did so “because it comforts the idea that the 35-hour week is positive and that things should go further, towards a 32-hour week”, adding: “Far from taking the direction of a rehabilitation of this measure, the hearings showed how this system is rigid and very complex.”
“Also, the reduction of the working week was applied in a very different manner in the private sector and the public sector,” he added.
In this interview with Mediapart, the report’s author, Barbara Romagnan, defends its conclusions and argues why there should be a further reduction in working hours, albeit under a different framework.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Mediapart: The 35-hour week is often criticised, including by some on the Left. Economy minister Emmanuel Macron regularly calls for an easing of the system.
Barbara Romagnan: Yes, but without any precise detail about this much talked-of easing. With the annualisation of working time and the reorganisation of work that it entailed, the 35-hour working week laws of 1998 and 2000 have brought flexibility to labour law. The Right has added further flexibility since 2002, [with the] maximum amount of [annual] overtime raised from 130 hours to 220 hours, the Tepa law under Nicolas Sarkozy, and so on.
Mediapart: Has the 35-hour week become something of a bugbear?
B.R.: Let’s put things into perspective. Between 1997 and 2002, two million jobs were created in five years, compared with three million over the entire preceding century. It is the only period during which so many jobs were created, and this while the active population increased by 1.5 million. Unemployment fell and public accounts were balanced. The 35-hour week is not the cause of all these positive results because growth was then strong. But [the Paris Institute of Political Studies’ economic research centre] the OFCE, and [the French labour ministry’s research and statistics department] the DARES talk, all the same, of 350,000 jobs created thanks to it. The 35-hour week improved the climate of confidence in society. One can believe that the European growth rate of an average 2.5% over these five years was largely driven by French growth. That is in fact what you could read in the European press at the time.
Mediapart: Has the 35-hour week cost French public finances dearly?
B.R.: The lack of income for public finances has been about 12 billion [euros] per year. But more employees were back in work, which stimulates growth, brings in more unemployment contributions from wages and economises unemployment benefits payments. Once all that has been taken into account, the annual cost is just 2 billion euros for companies. At a low price – 12,800 euros per job created.
Mediapart: Has the 35-hour week driven up the cost of labour?
B.R.: Globally, it hasn’t risen because the real rise has been compensated by a lowering of contribution payments, state aids and the capacity to organize things differently, by the greater use of machines in industry or the drastic limiting of overtime thanks to annualisation.
Mediapart: Has the economy’s competitiveness been affected by the 35-hour week?
B.R.: It was as of 2003-2004 that French competitiveness lost ground. But that’s essentially due to a change in the euro-dollar parity, which led to a considerable shock for competitiveness. At the same time, the Germans began to lower their labour costs. They did that on their own. In fact, fortunately not everyone on the continent did so Europe would then have been precipitated earlier into the situation that we experience today.
Mediapart: But if that is not the case, why do a large number of political figures, including some in the current government, continue to believe so?
B.R.: Out of laziness or by intellectual ease, and also because essential data is sometimes forgotten to be included in the calculations of the length of work, like part-time work, which is particularly lengthy in France, or women’s employment, which distorts international comparisons.
Mediapart: But the 35-hour week has been very criticised for its complexity for companies.
B.R.: Yes, because it has led to a reorganisation of labour that wouldn’t have necessarily been so, and companies were forced to negotiate with their employees. In [the space of] two years, there were between 65,000 and 100,000 collective company agreements.
Mediapart: Is it not the case that the fact that it was the state which first fixed the legal duration of the working week has also caused upset?
B.R.: As soon as you raise the issue of work, there is an ideological and cultural dimension. Some imagine that to reduce the duration of work means that no more work is done at all. But it is precisely between 1997 and 2002 that the number of hours worked in France was the highest. What’s more, the average working hours for a full-time job in France still remains today above 39 hours [per week]. On the other hand, it’s true that salaries later stagnated. So, even if the 35-hour week was an economic success, if France was at the time cited as a model, the individual benefit of the sharing of work has no doubt been less visible. But to come back to the role of the state, it is fortunate that the issue was set by law, even if that raised the hackles among some. You can’t give away billions in social contribution payments without something in return, an exchange.
Mediapart: Yet that is what the government is doing with the controversial so-called ‘responsibility pact’ , which offers businesses lower social contribution payments while urging them to hire more staff.
B.R.: Yes, and with the success that we see! The 35-hour week is a successful responsibility pact, in which, precisely, people were encouraged to be responsible. There was a drop in contribution rates, an important one, there were possibilities to organize work in a more flexible manner, in exchange for a lowering of working hours and the creation of jobs. In the ‘responsibility pact’ there is nothing in exchange. Now, when there are only drops in contribution payments without anything in return, there is greater profit for companies, potentially more money for shareholders, but much less job creation.
Mediapart: The 35-hour week has had negative effects in some firms, with an intensification of work and the development of polyvalent activities.
B.R.: Among those for whom life has not improved, it is firstly the lesser-qualified and especially for women with few qualifications. They were already in jobs where there was a large amount of flexibility, which was increased by this law. A quarter of the active population saw their working conditions particularly modified, for example in the catering industry and in hospitals, which sometimes caused suffering. But this is also due to a loose application of the law, for example when the durations of work breaks were recalculated. The law didn’t prevent that, and it’s a pity. It’s the same for the fixed-day deals for management staff, which has increased the intensity of work. Also, the [introduction of the] 35-hour week coincided with an increased use of technology by companies. In fact, the question of working conditions was unthought-of by the law, just like the question of the balance between private and working life, perhaps because union and company officials are often men.
Mediapart: The introduction of the 35-hour week in hospitals was particularly difficult. Is that not the greatest of the law’s failures?
B.R.: Yes. The hospital system was not supposed to be affected [by the 35-hour working week law] in the beginning. But staff asked for it. There were already difficulties. Personnel had to be trained and that took time. Before the [parliamentary] commission, [former socialist prime minister] Lionel Jospin himself said he should have waited two more years. But sometimes the 35-hour week is held responsible for difficulties that are also due to previous laws. Also, it allowed for the recruitment by hospitals of 45,000 people.
Mediapart: The 35-hour week was supposed to allow employees to organize their time differently.
B.R.: People invested themselves to a greater degree in leisure activities that they already exercised. There was more time for the family, and a greater investment of men in family life. But nothing changed for domestic chores, which remain female in majority.
Mediapart: Is a further reduction in working hours still possible? The current dominating mantra is that one must work more.
Once again, the 35-hour week is a law of flexibility. Should working hours be reduced further? I don’t say that it’s easy to follow on with this historic movement, but even if growth is weaker today than at the beginning of the 2000s, I don’t see why [a reduction of working hours] should stop. We can’t stay with so many of our fellow citizens inactive because that has a considerable cost, nor with so many employees on part-time. The calculation of the weekly [working] hours is no doubt no longer appropriate. Other forms of RTT [the term for days off in lieu] could be envisaged, for example with a re-thought time-saving account that would allow one to organize one’s time over several years, to take a professional pause or to follow classes throughout one’s life.
------------------------
The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse