35-hour workweek failing to deliver

PARIS — The 35-hour workweek, cheered by many French citizens four years go, is under attack as a “costly economic mistake.”

It has not generated more jobs, as promised at the time, but instead has contributed to the current unemployment rate of 9.9 percent of the labor force, or 2 million people, and has created a multibillion-dollar social-security burden, mainly on professionals who work 50 or more hours a week.

Pressure on the government from the Movement of French Entrepreneurs (MEDEF) employers association is growing, although there is no indication that the law will be scrapped. However, the conservative government is watching, with considerable concern, events in neighboring Germany, where many employers are succumbing to harsh economic realities.

Workers in several major German enterprises recently accepted longer hours and fewer benefits for the same wages. They include the electronic giant Siemens, which has extended the workweek from 35 to 40 hours after threatening to move its plants to Hungary, where the wages are 80 percent lower.

The German Railways also plan to increase the workweek from 38 hours to 42. Other major companies are expected to follow suit — in most cases with labor union approval.

In France, the electric appliances firm Bosch broke the 35-hour pattern by raising the workweek to 36 hours, warning the union that, otherwise, its operations will move to the Czech Republic for a fraction of the salaries paid in France.

France and Germany have close political links and consider themselves to be the “economic locomotive” of the European Union.

So far, fearing a massive and damaging reaction from the labor unions, the French government has stood by the 35-hour workweek — known as the Aubry Law after its author, former Socialist Minister of Labor Martine Aubry.

Most French labor unions consider the 35-hour workweek inviolable and a major shift since the mid-1930s when the socialist government of Leon Blum accepted a 40-hour workweek and granted the workers two weeks of paid vacations a year.

President Jacques Chirac and his Cabinet have adopted a policy of “more flexibility” in setting work hours, a concept that appeals to most employed Frenchmen. But the latest polls show that two out of three French workers are in favor of a major reform, including scrapping the Aubry Law.

Mr. Chirac’s influential Finance and Economy Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was more blunt than the president in his statements.

“To change the 35-hour week is possible and necessary if we want to modernize France,” he said last week.

Alain Madelin, a former minister of industry, said, “The 35-hour week represents a costly economic mistake for which we have not stopped paying. … It is an attack on the freedom to work. What right does the state have to prevent someone who wants to work more and earn more from doing just that?”