The French are getting….smarter. French MPs have voted to eliminate the mandatory 35-hour per week cap on working hours. It had been heralded when passed as a stroke of genius to increase the number of jobs by sharing out the work more equitably. Instead, it caused unemployment.
Jean-Baptiste Say
If only they had read the great French economists, such as Jean-Baptiste Say; every act of production brings into being wealth that can be traded for other wealth, or, as it has often been put, “Supply Creates Its Own Demand.”
Isn’t a 35 hour workweek rather small in importance? I mean, it’s not much different from a 40 hour workweek. Isn’t the artificial job security that has a bigger impact on unemployment?
It’s not quite “supply creates its own demand,” but, to quote Say, “…a product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.”
Adam is correct. What I put up was the popularization by which “Say’s Law” is usually known. (And the popular formulation is a bit misleading, too, since it assumes a smoothly functioning market price system.)
Nacim is, I think, quite right about the root causes of unemployment. But the intended solution, the 35-hour work week, did not generate the intended outcome. It did make matters worse, however, in a number of ways, including discouraging the investment of “sweat equity” in startup firms.
Impressive that this went through even after Sarkozy stepped down. I thought we’d have to wait until at least the next presidential election.
This is only for the private companies and only for when the companies have minus twenty workers.
The deputies adopted yesterday in first reading the private bill UMP over the 35 hours, by 370 votes (UMP-UDF) against 180 (PS-PCF-Greens). Eleven centre deputies, in dissension with the mode of increase of overtime, which remains less advantageous in the companies of less than twenty paid, did not take share with the vote.
Gerard Larcher, the minister delegated to the Relations of work, stressed that the legal duration of the working time remained “well at 35hours”, and it was pleased with a text which “creates new rights for the employees, increases their purchasing power at the same time as it gives to the companies the means of taking up the challenge of the growth”.
Herve Novelli, carried with Patrick Ollier this reform. Expressing his “pride”, the leader of the reformers was convinced that”while allowing the employees to choose their working time, in a voluntary way and under cover of a collective agreement (…) we give them an additional freedom. In the name of what, in the name of which archaism, in the name of which injunction would prevent them we from being a little freer?” Herve Novelli launched. Before concluding: “By adopting this text, we yes say to a wage increase, yes with the social dialogue, yes with additional freedoms, guarantees of a better personal blooming.”
In the name of the UDF group, Nicolas Perruchot said, without enthusiasm, this text “is for us only one installation with the margin, technique, of the organization of the working time in our country”.
The deputy mayor of Blois considered it regrettable that the government did not hear about the persistent injustice for the companies of less than twenty paid, whose mode of overtime remains less advantageous.
But on essence, the majority finally obtained an easing of the duration of the working time for the private companies. The text widens the possibilities of additional amount and use of the account saving-time (THIS). And it authorizes the voluntary employees to carry out overtime beyond the 220 hours quota per annum, within the framework of an agreement of branch or company.
But it is not the ending of the 35 hours week.