France’s 35-Hour Week As Overall Success
* Paper: France’s 35-Hour Week: Attack on Business? Win-Win Reform? Or Betrayal of Disadvantaged Workers? By ANDERS HAYDEN.POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 34 No. 4, December 2006 503-542
Abstract
"France’s 35-hour workweek is one of the boldest progressive reforms in recent years. Drawing on existing survey and economic data, supplemented by interviews with French informants, this article examines the 35-hour week’s evolution and impacts. Although commonly dismissed as economically uncompetitive, the policy package succeeded in avoiding significant labor-cost increases for business. Most 35-hour employees cite quality-of-life improvements despite the fact that wage moderation, greater variability in schedules, and intensification of work negatively impacted some—mostly lower-paid and less-skilled—workers. Taking into account employment gains, the initiative can be considered a qualified success in meeting its main aims."
Author Bio
Anders Hayden ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston College, where he teaches sociology of work and environmental sociology. His writing on work-time issues is part of a broader interest in the possibilities and limits of social and ecological reforms in contemporary capitalism, including efforts to promote ecological modernization in response to climate change. He is the author of Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption, & Ecology (London: Zed Books, 2000); and “Europe’s New Movement for Work-Time Reduction,” a 1998 report published by the Canadian Labour Congress.
More Information
- See Nyland’s discussion of nineteenth-century debates over reduction of the workday in which
opponents repeatedly overestimated the economic costs of WTR policies by failing to foresee the resulting increase in hourly productivity.
- Chris Nyland, Reduced Worktime andthe Management of Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- Working Time in Transition: The Political Economy of Working Hours in Industrial Nations, ed. Karl
Hinrichs, William Roche, and Carmen Sirianni (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991
Bibliographic references:
- Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991);
- Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and
- Moen and Patricia Roehling, The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).