France’s 35-hour week. Hollow protests

Is it really dying?

“IT'S the end of the 35-hour week,” deplored an official from the CGT, France's biggest trade union. The reform “will be the death of the 35-hour law”, Le Monde opined. Has the change to France's working-time law, which parliament passed on February 9th, scrapped the 35-hour week? To judge by all the protests, it might seem so: some 300,000-500,000 demonstrators took to the streets of France last weekend in a bid to protect the 35-hour week from such a “fatal blow”.

Yet the stand-off is deceptive; as one official says, it “has more to do with politics than with economics”. Last summer, when demands for a reform to the 35-hour week began to stir, President Jacques Chirac made clear that “the legal working time is, and will remain, 35 hours.” The latest amendment explicitly states that there is no change to the legal working week. But it makes it easier for employees to choose to spend more time at work: they can, for instance, cash in extra days off and work instead, or work longer hours if a collective agreement is reached with their company.

As Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the centre-right prime minister, puts it, the point is to enable “those who want to work more to earn more”. When the 35-hour week was introduced by the former Socialist government, employees got to work four hours less each week with no loss of pay. But most then suffered a pay freeze in return. With more time on their hands, but less money in their pockets, employees thanked the Socialists by booting them out in 2002. Mr Raffarin's changes are partly meant to restore lost purchasing power. This fits with broader plans just unveiled by Herve Gaymard, the finance minister, to cut income tax and boost consumption.

Yet the new measures are voluntary: both employer and employee must agree. An employer cannot impose extra hours, which will anyway be subject to 125% overtime pay. Nor will employees be guaranteed the extra hours they may seek. With the economy likely to grow by only 2.5% this year, the problem is thin order-books, not a need for overtime. The public sector is excluded from the new rules. And Mr Raffarin's changes will not protect small companies forever: in 2008, firms employing fewer than 20 people will have to pay 125% for overtime, not 110% as now.

Many big companies that painfully negotiated a shorter working week in 2000-02 are no longer keen to re-open it. Not that the policy was cost-free. Rather, they extracted flexible working practices and a pay freeze in return for the shorter week, and so learned to live with it. But mid-sized firms and the service sector had more problems. In return for not working a 35-hour week, many middle-ranking office workers won 10-20 extra paid days off, creating a management headache. Absenteeism has risen, according to a parliamentary report, as regular absence has been legitimised. In many ways, it is office staff not factory workers who benefited most from the 35-hour week. Nor is there any evidence that it created new jobs. It was implemented at a time of buoyant growth. Unemployment now touches 10%.

So why the fuss over the latest reform? The answer lies in the political struggle between the ruling centre-right and the Socialist Party, for whom the 35-hour week was its emblematic achievement. Mr Raffarin came round to reform only when it became clear that his party was itching to deal a symbolic blow to the left. Elections are still two years off, but the left is ahead in the polls. Franois Hollande, the Socialist leader, was among the protesters at the weekend. Of the rest, most were public-sector workers, who are unaffected by the reforms. Many were campaigning for a pay rise. Others were protesting against the European Union constitution.

• Primary Source