France's 35-hour workweek

BY RIITTA PIETILÄ When entering the office, one cannot help noticing a poster on the wall. It's about lions and gazelles in a jungle, and it says that it does not really matter whether you are the hunter or the hunted. The conclusion every morning remains the same: run faster, run for your life! It is in this atmosphere of encouraging brave competition (though not always fair play) that I meet Jean-Paul Dumont, the head of 'Superdécolletage', a metal company established some 30 years ago based on an old family enterprise, producing industrial components for the auto and white goods industries. The company, located in Haute-Savoie, France, has a capital of 300,240 euros (1,969,445 French francs, US$ 270,292) and employs about 100 workers, but it seems that practically the only person available this week or even this month -- it's August, the French holiday season -- is its owner, Dumont. Since the boss cannot boss his employees, he is bossing himself: "I've been doing 65-hour weeks during the vacation. I've also had a team of three hyper-efficient Germans here for two weeks -- they are leaving today -- to do the maintenance. They cost the company about 10,000 French francs a day and worked about 70 hours a week. "I have to hire foreigners because in this region we have a constant shortage of competent workers for this sector. In precision tooling, 2,000 people could be employed straight away, 1,500 of them technicians. We, in this business, could increase production by more than 25 per cent if only we had enough employees," declares Jean-Paul Dumont. "AN IMBECILE POLICY" He responds haphazardly when asked about the 35-hour week: "It is an imbecile policy for imbeciles -- but please don't write it down quite that way..." According to him, in the good old days only a few years ago, people in Superdécolletage typically worked 45 hours a week. Last year, this was reduced to 41.5 hours, and this year to the legal maximum, 39 hours. This means, of course, that the extra four hours have to be recompensed; in other words, the price of labour has risen. "This year, the expenses caused by the reform in our company, meaning the cost of skilled labour, will be 15 per cent more than last year. This represents three to five per cent of our total production costs. During the last two or three years, we have also done a lot of investing to compensate for the extra expenses caused by the loss of labour hours, and it won't be too easy to pay it back." Jean-Paul Dumont reckons that French businesses have three basic strategies to choose between in the new situation. The first option, though not an easy one in small companies, is that of Superdécolletage: production restructuring. The second choice is making no choice, just hoping for the best. And the third option is for Dumont the most appalling one: French businesses contribute to globalisation by investing abroad, possibly in Eastern European countries where production costs are still low. "These laws should be passed in all European countries at the same time -- now it's France who pays the bill! At the moment, our country is living beyond its means and, furthermore, subsidising EU countries like Italy or Spain with a growing economy and a 45-hour week." HOW DO THE EMPLOYEES FEEL? The same applies on a smaller scale to the country itself. We are now in the department of Haute-Savoie, where the unemployment rate is a meagre 4 per cent -- yet according to Dumont, skilled people in the manufacturing industry will not come here from other parts of France to work. In Superdécolletage at least, the number of employees has remained the same over the years: "For some people in France, being unemployed is already a profession in itself..." It only remains to ask how the employees feel about the shorter week. Dumont suspects that most of them are not too satisfied, because they have been deprived of the possibility of working and earning as much as they like. Some workers in the factory have already spent all their legal extra hours for the whole year by August and must hence stick strictly to the 35 hours for the rest of year. On the other hand, now that they have more spare time, the black labour market in France will grow, Dumont suggests. "THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE" But why not ask directly at the source? Jean-Marc Scrivano has been doing a 42-hour week in Superdécolletage and really wishes it could be more. Dominique Le Clezio works 39 hours a week: "Because that's what the boss suggested. For me it's fine," he says. (He is a rare bird, since he moved to the region from Northern France three months ago because of this job.) Both men estimate that there is no difference between the old and new system -- except the relatively better pay. The five weeks' holiday at least has not changed. My impression is that these two men do not know much about the whole thing: they have not discussed it with the others and do not even know whether the reform is now compulsory or not! "I don't think that the shorter week is an ideal solution, at least not yet. And I don't quite understand what it is all about, what the point is," Jean-Marc Scrivano says. "Maybe it is better suited for people who have a really hard job -- but that's not our case," estimates Dominique Le Clezio. They say that more and more workers are joining trade unions now; on the other hand, they do not know anybody in this company who is organised, not even among the five delegates who represent the workers in the meetings with management (in such a workers' delegation, at least one must join and represent the union). What an artless attitude, what a fresh opportunity for a trade unionist. A challenge! AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY Two centuries ago in Europe, those who had to work slaved some 15 hours a day; even children from poor families put in 12 solid hours. At the beginning of the 20th century, the official working week in France was 60 hours in six days -- and now the 35-hour week has been introduced in theory, if not yet in practice. The Act itself, enacted on June 13, 1998, and finalised at the beginning of this year, promised 39 hours of pay for 35 hours of work, with a two-year transition period. Before January, the shorter week only applied on a voluntary basis to companies with more than 20 employees; the rest will be obliged to comply by 2002 or face both positive and negative financial sanctions such as paying extra for the transition period and becoming ineligible for State subsidies. 1,600-HOUR YEAR, ACTUALLY Working 35 hours a week, instead of the earlier 39, sounds simple enough, but realising that it is actually rare to find a worker in France doing those 35 hours a week makes things more complex. To put it another way, it is not really 35 hours we are now talking about but 1,600 hours a year (instead of the earlier 1,782). "People actually continue to work approximately 37-38 hours a week, but they are compensated by giving them extra holidays," confirms Michel Huc, the general secretary of the metalworkers' union FO-Métallurgie. "The two-year transition period has already proved much too short, since production structures cannot be changed overnight. This is especially true in some branches of the metal industry, the most striking example being automobile production. The assembly lines are programmed for 39 hours, and restructuring the whole system requires new investment," Michel Huc continues. "As the actual need of a transition period of four to five years was not clearly foreseen in the primary calculations, we come to the second finding: in industry, the reform has turned out to be more expensive than expected. The production of services is much easier to adapt." FLOURISHING ECONOMY It is estimated that half of the working population in France is actually affected by the new Act -- out of the total of about 12 million workers and 1.2 million companies. White-collar workers are not yet covered; the fact that their weekly hours now easily reach 43 on average indicates that the negotiations beginning this month will be particularly tough. And paradoxical as it may seem, the reform -- the aim of which was to create jobs for Frenchmen by sharing work -- has not been too successful in finding people to share the work with: "There remains a lot of work to be done anyway, and high-tech industries suffer from a constant shortage of competent employees. The situation as a whole is rather peculiar... So France, being a country of immigrants, continues to attract workers from the outside as well." No wonder: the country's economy is flourishing, and this Spring unemployment figures have fallen under the magical limit of 10 per cent for the first time since the end of the 1980s. The French government's recent claim that about 220,000 jobs have been saved or created by the 35-hour week has been taken with a considerably large pinch of salt in certain quarters, since it is of course difficult to distinguish the impact of policy changes and the effects of the economic cycle. SECOND ANNIVERSARY CONGRATULATIONS -- TO WHOM? "Out of the 220,000 industrial posts saved or created, about 90 per cent are due to the latter, declares Bernard Fillonneau, the national secretary of the metalworkers' union FGMM-CFDT. "The metal industry's share is difficult to determine: on a national level, 739 agreements covering about 515,000 employees have been signed thus far. Since most of these agreements were negotiated in enterprises which are growing, the number of agreements of course doesn't show how many of these people exactly were saved from unemployment because of the RTT (reduction du temps de travail - or reduction of working time). It has been estimated to have been 42,000 in June (the second anniversary of the Act, named 'Aubry', after the labour minister), and in about 6,200 of these cases it was a question of keeping an existing job." Having at least some idea of the (semi-)final results, we should now ask: how did it all happen? The French employers' organisation Medef immediately commentated the latest good news from the Labour Ministry in June: according to Medef, the economic upswing is due to the "dynamism of French enterprises and their employees," who bravely continued to work 39 hours a week last year -- that is, business is booming is not because of the RTT but in spite of it! A TWO-YEAR FREEZE ON WAGES A kind of a backdoor effect has also been described: the shorter workweek is providing a nice opportunity for workplace reform, which is surely adding to the 'dynamism' of French enterprises. In introducing elements such as productivity and flexibility in the workplace quietly, without triggering social unrest, the reform could actually accomplish something the left-wing coalition government never planned: a kind of housecleaning in French companies. "Some employers of course don't agree with the idea that the reform has created jobs, for ideological reasons. They were against RTT right from the beginning, particularly in the metal industry where the first general agreement (July 1998) was actually in contradiction with the new Act," Bernard Fillonneau says. The metal agreement having been replaced by a new one (January 29, 2000), the main argument against RTT remains the same: money. The French statistical institute Insee estimates that in more than 80 per cent of cases where working time reductions have been implemented, they have been accompanied by a commitment to a wage freeze or a cap on wage demands, often for a two-year period. It is also not unknown for employees to accept salary cuts -- as an alternative to losing one's job. AN OPPORTUNITY NOT TO MISS Maybe the money matter is not the whole truth? A poll found that less than 10 per cent of French citizens believed that they will benefit from the shorter workweek -- yet, according to another and more recent poll, 70 per cent are in favour of it. Some conflicts and demonstrations have occurred in plants during these first two years, but according to Fillonneau, it is against wages and hours that people have protested; not against the Act itself but some of its applications. This means that from a trade union point of view the RTT is an opportunity not to miss. As Bernard Fillonneau puts it, for the first time unions are granted a real opportunity for proving their raison d'être by safeguarding the rights of workers and shaping current social debate on the subject in France. "RTT has allowed unions to enter French companies, to contact the employees, to talk to them and to inform them about their rights and the options they have in this constantly changing situation. In that way, we in the trade unions get to know the realities in the plants in which the workers are living -- and they of course get in touch with the trade unions. We are there to provide them help to help themselves! "At the moment, we are dealing a lot with the problem of flexibility, flexible hours having in some cases led to the extreme -- like working over 10 hours a day. Also, the discussion of how the actual working time should be calculated -- with or without breaks -- is very current now," Fillonneau relates. THE INTERNATIONAL EFFECT? Fillonneau points out that signing agreements is, of course, not enough; it is now time to discuss the details further and particularly to monitor the many different ways in which the Act is applied in real life. After all, a shorter working week is much too important an issue to be ignored: it is about a better quality of life. Also, although it has been estimated that the complexity of French working life -- not to mention the cost of an employee -- will prevent foreign investment in France, Fillonneau sees no negative impact on the international level either. Instead, he turns the problem around: the shorter week has come to stay in France, and other countries will soon follow. In that way, it will all end up well, for even if the wind is sometimes stormy, everybody is in the same boat. Riitta Pietilä is a free lance journalist