Of course a few people, like us, are still working. But we promise not to let that cloud our judgment. We have seen the future in France, and it is vacation–whether we want it or not.
The French, who already work 41 fewer days on average than Americans, are about to take more time off. In the high-pressure global economy, this sounds like suicidal sloth. But is the French economy in the dumps? Au contraire: growth is up and unemployment is finally falling. What’s going on? Well, maybe the best way to understand this–and it takes some explaining, so please, have a glass of wine, adjust your sunglasses–is to realize that this is just another step on France’s quirky, occasionally retrograde path to a modern capitalist economy.
With one law passed last summer, and another one due this fall (after the government gets back), the French workweek is being reduced from 39 hours to 35. In some cases, increases in leisure time will be parceled out by the minute; but in others it will simply mean more vacation days, depending on how businesses negotiate the law’s many intricacies.
Long vacations aren’t unique to France. The Italians shut down for August. Germans (and some Scandinavians) toil even fewer hours than the French, and their manufacturing workers earn far more. But the French still stand out. According to the government’s own calculations, many white-collar workers will soon put in fewer than 210 days a year. That’s only seven months out of 12. And many of those same workers, under a bonus system, get paid for 13.
Are the French celebrating on the sands of St-Tropez? Toasting their good luck among the camping tents at Deauville? Not exactly.
Executives who have to compete globally aren’t taking off much extra time, whether they work for French or foreign companies. Jean-Olivier Bartholin, chairman of Chase Bank in France, will be getting an additional two weeks of vacation, at least. “BFD,” he said, using a favorite American expression. “I won’t be able to use them anyway.”
Even workers lower down the wage scale aren’t necessarily enthusiastic. Gustave Glori, 30, stocks shelves at a Paris supermarket. We found him at a campsite in Deauville, one of the great Atlantic resort towns, setting up a tent with a couple of friends and planning to party all weekend. But he hasn’t taken a real vacation in 10 years, just an extra day here and there. “People come back from vacation broke,” he says. A few tents and trailers farther down the road, an unemployed 52-year-old chemist was eating lunch on a folding table with his wife and daughter. “If I find another job, I don’t want any more vacations,” he said. “Five weeks is quite enough.”
“People will have to work more in less time. I’m not sure that’s social progress,” said Isabelle Alexandre, a lawyer from Rennes who was oiling and sunning herself among the throngs on the Cote d’Azur. “I think it’s a trap for wage earners.”
The 35-hour week has also been something of a trap for the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. It was a promise made in the 1997 parliamentary elections when Jospin seemed to have no prayer of victory. Then he won. The Socialists had claimed that cutting back the week was a panacea for unemployment, which was a painful 12.5 percent when they took office. Companies would need more people to produce the same amount of goods and services. So instead of 20 folks working 39 hours a week, you might have 22 working 35 hours. And their pay would stay the same! Or so the Socialists promised. To make up the cost to the employers, the government would provide subsidies and incentives. The bill to the taxpayer has been estimated in the tens of billions of euros. How it will be financed has never been made clear.
Do the Socialists really think this will work? In many cases, no. Just a few months after Jospin came to power, one of his ministers told News-week, “Nobody believes in this 35-hour thing.” Yet a year later the plan was still going strong. Martine Aubry, who holds several portfolios including employment, rammed through the first 35-hour law in June 1998. Her popularity has soared, second only to Jospin’s, and far ahead of the more conservative and skeptical minister of the economy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
There is a paradox at work here that has more to do with French emotions than global economics. Many French, clearly, doubt they’ll get much personal benefit from the legislation. Yet the idea of more time off has a lot of popular appeal. Despite all the vacation they already have, the French no longer seem to enjoy the relaxed style of life they once did. Recent studies show the 90-minute Parisian lunch hour is now more on the order of 30 minutes. “Le fast food” has replaced the once leisurely midday meal. When the French take vacations, the first thing many of them do is sit down around a table for a lunch that lasts all afternoon.
This being France, there’s no shortage of intellectuals to rebut the received (and rather Anglo-Saxon) wisdom that toil is virtuous in itself. “We have to break this spell, and demystify work,” says philosopher Dominique Meda. Author Pierre Sansot extols the virtues of slowing down. He passionately defends his own checklist of humanistic rights: to stroll, to listen, to be bored, to dream, to wait, to look inward, to write, to drink wine and, just generally, to take it easy. Gaullist President Jacques Chirac has questioned the timing of the Socialists’ labor bills. But in 1994 he wrote the introduction for a book called “In Praise of the Siesta.” “Rest is serious business,” said Chirac, “and the quality of it governs our existence.”
At times, the romance with “les 35 heures” has seemed to win out over reason. White-collar types, in France as elsewhere, are inclined to work as hard and long as it takes to move up. But here they’ve run afoul of the inspecteurs du travail. These bureaucrats used to protect workers from abuse by employers. Now they protect workers from colleagues who want to get ahead. Fines and two-year jail terms have been threatened against executives who permit overtime work without filing the proper forms with the proper authorities. Ikea furniture stores and Auchan supermarkets had to install time clocks for their managers because of overtime violations.
“There might be companies that simply go out of business because of the 35-hour workweek,” says Robert Rochefort, director of CREDOC, an institute that does research on social issues. Short-time might make sense to the government’s fonctionnaires (Strauss-Kahn joked last month that 35 hours would mean five more hours a week for them). But private-sector employees have to find ways to keep up. Though about 11,000 businesses have signed accords implementing the laws, many people say they’ll ignore them. Others may work from their homes, telecommuting out of sight of the inspecteurs. “There’s going to be an enormous disruption of people’s social and family life,” says Jacques Fessine of the Institut de la Recherche Syndicale.
But maybe, in a typical–which is to say exceptional–French way, the ruse has been worth the risk. Few analysts believe Aubry’s claim that the 35-hour policy has created more than 100,000 jobs. But unemployment has declined to 11.3 percent, the lowest level in almost seven years. Growth could hit 2.7 percent this year. Foreign companies may have misgivings about the 35-hour week, but foreign investment in France was up 22 percent in 1998 over 1997. The euro continues to drive change, and to facilitate it. Industries from aluminum to oil to banking are restructuring in a series of hard-fought, distinctly un-French mergers. Huge corporations like France Telecom, Thomson-CSF and Credit Lyonnais are being privatized, with barely a peep from the communists in the government coalition. Strauss-Kahn has been whittling away at taxes, trying to create more incentives for entrepreneurs. The 35-hour debate provides good political cover while all this moves forward.
Some officials will even tell you, between the mille-feuille and the coffee, that Jospin’s model is “the U.S.A., the most successful economy in the world.” But on the record, they’d rather talk about the virtues of the shorter week. “It’s a popular move,” as one official put it, but “it’s probably the last of those measures that will be taken just to satisfy the left-wing constituencies.”
The people of France may never be persuaded to keep their clothes on in the month of August. But whether most of them know it or not, their country is likely to be a major player in a world where competition is high and relaxation rare. So try not to begrudge them their month in the sun. A decade from now, 1999’s promise of an endless vacation is likely to be remembered with that touch of wistfulness that always lingers when the summer’s gone.
