title: “Off The Deep End” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “James Hardin”
Barely 100 days into his tenure at the Finance Ministry, Sarkozy has focused on the most controversial pocketbook issue in French politics: the nation’s 35-hour workweek. This revolutionary labor law, passed by the previous Socialist government, went into effect in 2000. It was supposed to be a panacea for the jobless, founded on the peculiarly European notion that if more people work less (but keep the same salaries as when they worked more) lots of good jobs will be created. “Time for me, work for others,” was the slogan for this French version of voodoo economics.
Of course the measure didn’t lower the unemployment rate, now around 10 percent; it just pleased those already on the job. It also hung an economic millstone around the neck of the French state, which has compensated businesses with huge tax breaks to help them adjust. “France will soon dedicate 16 billion euro per year to prevent people from working,” Sarkozy told the French financial newspaper Les Echos last month. “We are the only country in the world that is in this situation.”
Sarko was exaggerating a tad there. Neighboring Germany has already started facing up to similar illusions. There, as in the rest of Europe, the length of the workweek shrank steadily from 1970 to 2002, according to a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and employers have had enough. Two weeks ago Siemens threatened to move 2,000 jobs from Germany to Hungary if workers didn’t agree to longer and more-flexible working hours. Despite several nationwide protests, the country’s largest union, IG Metall, was forced to accept a deal pushing the week back up to 40 hours, from 35, with no increase in pay. “It’s about market forces,” says Paul Swaim, one of the OECD economists who worked on the survey. “Globalization is making everyone insecure, and that creates a difficult negotiating climate for workers in many countries.”
For a lesser politician, Sarkozy’s frontal attack on the philosophy of “less work means more jobs” and the legislation it spawned might be fatal. After all, how do you wean workers off what amounts to eight weeks of paid vacation a year? President Chirac, no fan of the law, has skirted the issue to avoid stirring up unrest. A slim majority of the French say they might go along with working a few more hours, but 60 percent think they ought to get more money for it–even if the alternative is forcing companies to relocate abroad.
Yet it’s Sarko, not Chirac, who’s topping the polls of conservative politicians. He says he wants to get the pain of change over with as quickly as possible, so that France can recover from the shock, and prosper. Pain there surely will be. Taking to the streets to protect perceived rights, even when they’re more like perks, is a French tradition at least as old as Bastille Day. Sarkozy, who’s got to find some way to kick-start the economy and cut government spending, says what’s required is simply creativity and courage. “Where there is no margin in which to maneuver,” he told a crowd of journalists in May, “it must be created by movement and will.”
One of Sarkozy’s trademarks is his penchant for leaping into the political abyss with the reckless abandon of a bungee jumper, and each time he does, the stark contrast with the increasingly cautious 71-year-old Chirac grows more apparent. During Sarko’s first cabinet stint as Interior minister, he won the love of the police, convinced the public they were safer and tackled the complex issue of Muslim integration in France head-on. At Finance, he’s already persuaded high-spending government ministries to do more with less. He’s reined in Chirac’s propensity for spending on special interests, and he’s even managed to talk massive chain stores into lowering their prices by an average of 2 percent. “Nothing is taboo,” says Sarkozy, in his search for new revenue.
Certainly a large part of the business community is itching to take on les 35 heures. “We have a majority in Parliament that is critical of the law, but all we hear about it are declarations of intention, not concrete propositions,” says Ernest Antoine Seilliere, head of the powerful French business association known as MEDEF. One solution, he says, would be to allow companies to negotiate directly with their workers–much the way Siemens did. (Thus far Sarkozy has not endorsed any specific plan.)
Already in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, employees at a plant owned by the German company Bosch face a choice between seeing their jobs outsourced to the Czech Republic or working an extra hour each week with a 12 percent pay cut and the loss of other perks. If employees agree with the plan, union officials say, 150 jobs will be saved. “It’s like having to choose between the rope and the gun,” says Mohamed Brahmi, a member of the radical CGT metalworkers union. Others call it “outsourcing blackmail.” While the preamble of the Bosch agreement specifies that it shouldn’t be used as a model for other companies, “it opened up a breach, and now politicians like Sarkozy are going for it,” says Brahmi.
Ironically, even if it doesn’t make sense in a globalized world, the 35-hour week is now one of those Gallic “exceptions” that even some French companies have come to cherish. “We cut labor hours but maintained salaries, gained more flexibility, and we benefited from tax breaks,” says a spokesperson for French auto giant PSA Peugeot Citroen. Now, she says, “we’re not too favorable toward anything that could set us back.”
Still, Sarkozy has good reason to forge ahead. The conservative activists whose support he needs to take over Chirac’s political coalition this fall are true believers in the reform. And at this point Sarko doesn’t actually have to get the law repealed, or even amended. He just needs to show that, politically, it could be. “If Sarkozy succeeds, he will be able to say: ‘They said it was impossible, that society would explode, that I would sacrifice myself in trying, and I have succeeded’,” says Eric Mandonnet, a political writer with French weekly L’Express. Chirac’s supporters, who have been counting on Sarko to fail, may have to come up with a better strategy if they want to keep their own jobs. The thing about bungee jumpers, after all, is that they keep coming back at you.
