1. not attacking anyone, glynch...just pointing out a cultural difference. 2. vacations are great for people. i don't want the government mandating my vacation, however. 3. no...there are laws in france that specifically limit the number of hours you can work. it was a product of the cultural ministry, as i understand it.
No, glynch....it's a crime. http://lpa.igc.org/lpv45/lpp45_relax.html Relax! (and Uphold Global Labor Standards) Photo: ©Maria Dumlao, Impact Visuals Having to work overtime is a crime. But in France, it’s a crime employers are actually being prosecuted for, facing fines and even jail time. Come 2000, the government crackdown on overtime violators will probably have to intensify. That’s when France’s newly legislated 35-hour workweek is scheduled to go into effect. With their short workweek and nationally mandated five weeks of paid vacation (not to mention four to seven weeks of paid parental leave), French workers are leaving Americans in the dust when it comes to living the good life. But the 35-hour week isn’t just about kicking back. France is facing an unemployment rate of 11 percent. Thanks to income protections French workers have won, being unemployed isn’t as dire in France as it is in the U.S. Still, it’s a problem. So last summer, France’s National Assembly decided to spread the work around by requiring all employers with over 20 workers to reduce the workweek from its present 39 hours to 35 hours a week — with no change in pay. Violators will be prosecuted. Already, France has stepped up enforcement of overtime laws. Hundreds of labor inspectors are sniffing around workplaces, looking for evidence of overtime perps, like too many cars in a parking lot. The French press reports that some overeager workers are smuggling laptops home under their raincoats so they can keep working without triggering a legal proceeding. Let’s Make a Study of It To John Vellardita, president of PACE Local 10-1202 in Madison, Wisconsin, all this has great appeal. So much so that he recently made a trip to Paris to study the 35-hour-week law. He explains that his members, who work for Rock-Tenn, a paper packaging company, are being pressured to accept grueling 12-hour shifts. "It’s the employer’s solution to overcapacity," he says. "But it wreaks havoc on peoples’ lives." More and more industrial workers are being forced into 12-hour shifts, as employers move to continuous 24-hour production (broken into three 12-hour stints). Vellardita notes that while some workers, especially younger ones, agree willingly to 12-hour shifts because they offer a 3-day weekend, others accept the long weekdays out of fear that if they don’t, their plant will be closed. Vellardita would rather see his members work shorter, saner hours — like the French. The U.S., of course, doesn’t currently face the soaring unemployment levels the French do. However, Vellardita points out, "We’re still seeing an incredible loss of industrial jobs. Plants are closing down all over, and it’s not because we’re producing less. We’re producing more, and yet we’re seeing a loss of jobs and union members." Why not reduce the workweek and hire more workers, rather than force fewer and fewer into back-breaking overtime? Vellardita says the French workers he’s spoken to "are amazed that shorter work time isn’t a major issue in the U.S." Americans Work Too Hard The average full-time worker in this country now works a 44-hour week, and many work much more. Overtime represents about 20 percent of the total time worked by autoworkers these days. The issue of overtime has emerged in this summer’s contract talks between the United Auto Workers and the big three automakers. UAW president Stephen Yokich has argued that some 86,000 auto jobs would open up if the automakers stopped the overtime. A shorter workweek would net even more jobs. The French government recently calculated that 56,767 jobs have already been saved since the 35-hour workweek law was passed a year ago. On average, the employment ministry announced, the new law has created or saved some 5 percent of jobs and increased productivity by 3 percent. (It’s well-documented that people work more efficiently and safely when the workday is short.) The savings are showing up even before the law goes into effect because unions are already negotiating contracts based on it. In fact, the government is providing financial incentives for companies that cut the workweek and take on more workers in advance of the 2000 deadline. Companies with fewer than 20 workers will have until 2002 to comply with the new law. In January, French utility workers won a new contract that calls for a 35-hour workweek and encourages each work unit to consider a 32-hour, four-day workweek at 97.1 percent of full pay. The union also got French electric and gas utilities to agree to take on an extra 20,000 young workers over the next three years. Since only about 15,000 utility workers are due to retire over that period, the agreement will net an extra 5,000 jobs. French employers have generally opposed the new law, warning that it will cause capital flight. U.S.-owned companies, which employ some 1.6 million French workers, have been the most vociferous. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has even threatened French business and government that strict enforcement of the 35-hour week could deter U.S. investment. Bottom of the Heap! Obviously, to maintain global working standards, the rest of the industrialized world is going to have to catch up with the French. The European Confederation of Trade Unions has stressed its support for a 35-hour workweek Europe-wide. Spain is already moving in that direction. Belgium is debating some pilot projects to reduce work-time, including one plan in which the government would help employers finance a cut from 38 to 32 hours by allowing them to pay reduced social security contributions for six years. Some unionists feel the plan is too generous to employers. American workers are at the bottom of the heap in the industrialized world, with our unenforced 40-hour workweek and an average vacation length of 9.3 days (that’s even averaging in workers with lots of seniority and unionized workers who have won more!) Meanwhile, back in Paris, reports UE’s European correspondent Jeff Apter, people are at the height of the summer siesta. Most people take a big chunk of their five-week legally mandated vacations in August. "People go to the coastline, the mountains," he says. "Things pretty much shut down in August."
and no...it's not creating jobs. what a ridiculous notion. http://www.iht.com/IHT/JV/99/jv060199.html France's Shift to a 35-Hour Workweek: Is It Breeding Jobs or Higher Taxes Government Hails Its Initiative, But Nobody Else Is Copying It -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By John Vinocur International Herald Tribune -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PARIS - In a Europe dominated by Socialist and Social Democratic parties - but living with the very nonideological attempts of Prime Minister Tony Blair to restrain the welfare state and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's still flailing efforts to devise an approach to it -- France's 35-hour workweek is really the last leftist showpiece going. By its own standards, the government's great initiative has turned out to be at least a partial success. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin registers solid popularity, the plan has given the country a sense of fighting unemployment that has no real rival in Europe and the French left likes the notion that it can ride this emblematic undertaking through to the presidential elections in 2002. But as an experiment in sheer willfulness, decreeing new jobs by shortening the time worked on old ones, the 35-hour week seems to have entered the nontriumphant zone of French projects like the Grand Arch at La Defense or the Pyramid at the Louvre, interesting constructions, but without adulation or imitation from friends abroad. Almost a year after the legislation was passed, there is little evidence the law will provide anything like the 700,000 new jobs some government projections claimed for it at the start. In fact, while the government has announced new taxes on business to pay for the state subsidies designed to soften the law's impact on companies, a respected economist is saying the 35-hour week is likely to kill 200,000 jobs in the next two or three years on top of the current French unemployment rate of 11.5 percent. ''What a distance we've come!'' Labor Minister Martine Aubry said in issuing a first progress report, which said the law had led to 57,000 jobs being created or saved. The employers' association, or Medef, countered that the real figure is 15,000 overall, or one job for every thousand in the nongovernmental sector of the economy. And a major trade union said the new job figure for the entire economy was more like 35,000. In response to Madame Aubry's assertion that the law was keeping its promises, newspaper reports said her arithmetic on 57,000 job creations involved 14,000 existing jobs described as ''saved,'' 13,000 hires or promises of employment in the state-controlled public service sector and thousands of windfall job creations coming out of company expansion programs that fell under the terms of the law. With the deadline for conforming to the law set for Jan. 1 for firms with more than 20 employees (and two years later for those with less), the reality of what is being accomplished appears to lie in the paradox that the law produces results that contradict its ideological foundation. On one hand, the government seems unlikely ever to be able to demonstrate it found the alchemy to avoid standard market-oriented economics and allow the state to command a mass of new jobs by reducing working time to 35 hours from the previous limit of 39. Yet more positively, there are employers who say that negotiations on the 35-hour week have given them the chance to rationalize schedules and to bring a new kind of flexibility to the workplace. This is the extra ideological rub: The workplace flexibility is a concept that parts of the left scorn as a Thatcherite attempt to dismantle the labor market protections the Socialists have pledged to defend. The most authoritative attack on the law followed the government's announcement that it would attempt to pay for lower social benefit costs to employers, given as incentives for the 35-hour week, by establishing an environmental tax and another tax on corporate profits. ''The job creation coming out of this plan is extremely small,'' said Patrick Artus, research director at Caisse des Depots & Consignations, a large, state-affiliated investment institution. ''It's a foolhardy initiative, dramatically not good. If you examine what's happening, it looks surrealistic. I just feel that as an economist it's my duty to call this to people's attention.'' The effect of the reduction in working time, he said, was actually to increase the pretax minimum wage of 6,797 francs ($1,080) a month by 11.4 percent. As a result of the subsidies to employers increasing their labor forces, the real rise represented a 4 percent to 5 percent increase in costs to employers. At the minimum wage level, Mr. Artus said, a correlation established by a government agency showed that a 1 percent wage increase meant a substantial diminution in hiring. Under these circumstances, he projected the loss of 200,000 jobs. According to Mr. Artus, there are virtually no productivity advantages to be gained in the government's equation. Rather, he said, ''the fact is that all this is going to cost about 65 billion francs to finance, and we have no idea where the money will come from. The new taxes can't handle it and it will become a public deficit problem.'' An office furniture manufacturer, Dominique Artaud, agrees with Mr. Artus on the rough estimation of the cost to the bottom line. President of Steelcase Strafor of Strasbourg, a subsidiary of Steelcase Inc. of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Mr. Artaud said, however, that his increase in costs would be absorbed through a freeze in salaries. In fact, Mr. Artaud's new labor contracts accomplished precisely what some French labor unions say they don't like about the introduction of the 35-hour week: that it serves as cover to employers for givebacks on working conditions. At one Steelcase Strafor unit, a an agreement now sets the number of hours worked in terms of an annual total, with workweeks varying between 14 and 44 hours. Under the new guidelines, management now has up to Thursday midday to set the following week's hourly quota. ''For years,'' Mr. Artaud said, ''everyone around me, my neighbors, my cousins, everyone saw the job situation in decline. I didn't see anybody go at the problem. Now they're dealing with it. It's easy to say no, but let's see. If you say no, you've got to propose something.'' Although social costs to employers in France run to 21.9 percent of the minimum wage, compared to 3 percent in Britain or 7.7 percent in the United States, Mr. Artaud said his factory in Sarrebourg would remain one of the company's most productive in Europe. Mr. Artus, in turn, sees no way for the government to modify its approach, which he has said is rooted in ''political obstinacy'' and signified a serious problem for France. Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, president of the employers association, has a similar viewpoint. ''They told us that these 35 hours would be self-financing,'' he said. ''That's false. We were told there wouldn't be any new taxes, well here they are. These exclusively French solutions are going to discourage employment and the entrepreneurial spirit, and make the economic future of this country still chancier.''
About this whole 35-hour work week that is supposedly a godsend for the lazy French. Their unemployment rates are through the roof and their productivity (duh!!!) is down. When have you ever bought any French manufactured goods, like a car? I'd love to be able to say that I work 40+ hours a week, but that's not the case. Those who succeed in this country work 60-70 hours a week and sometimes more. And of their ditching of the term email, what do you expect out of them? No one's ever accused the French of being reasonable. They are a bunch of losers who haven't realized history has left their quaint countriy behind centuries ago. An inferiority complex fed by losing every war they've fought in tends to do that to you. That's the French for you. Quick to protest when MacDonalds and Disney World spring up, even quicker to run away when the Germans invade.
The views of some of the posters in this thread do not necessarily reflect those of the the thread-starter. Thank you.
I know some here would rather take the opportunity to just criticize the French than actually think about what they are doing, but I wanted to point out there seems to be a disconnect on what kind of work we're talking about. The work limits are put on working stiffs. Managers and execs don't get this protection. And, it really isn't much different from the protections American union workers get in the North, where union-participation is required in some jobs whether you want to join or not. I won't deny some of our own union laws are messed up, but there is logic in it. If you allow some to break from the mold, it puts a competitive pressure on the others. So, there will be pressure to conform. And, if you want to be a big-business exec who has to sell his whole life to get ahead in the business world, you can work the 80-hour weeks. These laws apply mostly to the blue-collar workers, the pencil-pushers and other work-for-a-living types. They won't be prosecuting for the consultants, lawyers and other workaholics of the country.
JV - that was basically what I was trying to point out with my post earlier...just didn't spell it out like you did. Max, You know that article was written before the law was fully initiated...unemployment reached 18-year lows. From a 2001 article: The French economy has grown at a healthy rate every year since the present centre-left government led by Prime Minister Lionel Jospin came to power in 1997, and France is second only to Britain among European countries in attracting foreign investors. As for the key issue of creating new jobs (Aubry's main motive for cutting the working week), France's unemployment rate has come down from 12,6 percent in 1997 to 8,5 percent now. 2002: In September 2002, the French government issued an evaluation report on the implementation of the 35-hour week, which is to be submitted to parliament. The report examines the principal effects of the negotiated reduction of working time, which began in 1996. Since then, the creation of an estimated 300,000 jobs has been attributable to the reduction of working time. The switch to the 35-hour week has involved a large rise in the amount of company and sectoral collective bargaining and has generated an increase in the flexibility of working schedules. Those employees who have experienced working time cuts have responded positively overall, although opinions differ widely according to employees' levels of skills The report was published just as the government proposed new measures to introduce flexibility into the 35-hour week. fyi, the new flexibility issues deal with extending the exemption to the 35 hour week, based on specific job types. 2003: Reduced work weeks are increasingly popular in Europe. Three years ago, France reduced its official work week to 35 hours, a change that analysts say has had no negative impact on the country's economy. The "crime" article was also in 1999...and was only guessing that the government would have to crack down. I have not seen anything about increased fines against employers for making their people work more than 43 hours...dunno. Anyway, the system is not perfect, but nothing ever is...it just is not as bad as it has been made out to be.
Actually, now I remember the American parallel I was going to draw. We have sweatshop laws in the States that dictate, for example, that you must give your employees at least 20 minutes for lunch. Thousands of office-workers work through their lunch break without bringing the law down on their employers, but the law does keep employers from coercing their employees into working through lunch 'voluntarily.'
Workweek constraints are hardly a new idea, and governments/corporations have been "timesizing" for a long time now. (Timesizing being reducing employee work hours rather than downsizing payrolls) The United States itself used timesizing during the Depression to help alleviate rising unemployment. Here's a quote from Ben Hunnicutt, an economic historian at the University of Iowa about this country's experience with timesizing during the depression: In fact, even today 17 states (Texas included) have worksharing programs in place which reduce work weeks in order to save jobs. It's mostly a temporary thing though. The idea of using unemployment insurance money to accomodate shorter workweeks and more employees in hard times is hardly a new one, but it has been gaining popularity in states, especially with current economic conditions. I don't think it's fair to pawn this off as "some silly thing the French are doing," since there is historical precedent and empirical justification behind it. Now about eating french fries with mayonnaise...
MadMax's posts might make it sound more than it actually is. But there is no denial that the working force as a whole from top to bottom in France work a lot less than the American counterparts. And their unions are much more powerful than those here, hence, a lot more strikes. The whole outlook about work and vacation is very different from the American way. Is it good or bad? I don't know. BTW, do you guys still remember how the American workers reacted when the Japanese implied that American auto workers were lazy?
In many ways the French and the Europeans have decided to run the society more for the good of the average employee who probably make up a good 80% of all those who work. In the US particularly under the extreme market ideology prevalent today, which teaches this ideology in a primitve fashion as being a law sort like the law of gravity, we are running the society for the business owners and self employed but not for the average worker. I'm sure that the average self employed shop owner or self employed lawyer is not limited in the number of hours they can work. A further recent attack on employee's working conditions is the attempt by the Republicans to do away with overtime laws for most employees. As the bumper sticker says: "Unions, the folks that you brought you the weekend".
