In practice, we didn’t get any new recruits. We were told that we would all have to become 10 per cent more efficient during our reduced work time. Which we did. It’s not hard to become more productive if the incentive is twenty-two days’ extra holiday a year.
An OECD report said that productivity in France went up 2.32 per cent between 1996 and 2002, compared with only 1.44 per cent in the rest of the EU. And four of those years were before the thirty-five-hour week was introduced. If you took just 2000–2002, once the thirty-five-hour week had begun, I’m sure the results would be even more startling.
As I said, the French work to live. Or, more precisely, they work to go on holiday. A French worker won’t bust their gut to be voted employee of the month and get their mugshot on the wall. But promise them enhanced lifestyle time, and they can work wonders.
‘Anglo-Saxon’ economists predict meltdown if a similar scheme were to be introduced in their countries. And they might be right. Because there is one major difference between the French and Anglo-Saxons.
Give a Frenchman a long weekend and he’ll get in his French car, fill it with French petrol, drive to the French seaside, countryside or mountains, and spend three or four days eating and drinking French food and wine. Give a Brit the same opportunity and he’ll get in an Irish jet and fly to Bulgaria.
The French travel abroad a lot, but a massive amount of their money stays at home. It seems too good to be true, but it is true – working less is good for the French economy.
The End of the
Thirty-Five-Hour Week?
Under pressure from employers who say they’re paying a full-time salary for part-time work, and from right-wing politicians who say that the Anglo-Saxon model of overwork is good for the soul, the French government recently authorized companies to abolish the thirty-five-hour week. But everyone knows that any attempt to take rights away from French workers results in a national strike, so the increase in worktime is being dealt with in a typically French way. Employers will have to negotiate the increase with their employees, who can refuse and remain on thirty-five hours. And if the full-time working week is increased to thirty-nine hours again, employers will have to buy back the hours at the employees’ rate of salary. In other words, the employer will have to offer four hours’ pay, or a 10 per cent rise.
And that’s supposed to be good for the employers?
A State of Mind
The people with the worst reputation for being relaxed during office hours are the fonctionnaires, the state workers. French comedian Coluche used to tell a joke: ‘My mum was a fonctionnaire, and my dad didn’t work either.’
The fonctionnaires include teachers, the police, hospital workers, firefighters, all civil servants in government offices and researchers in state institutes. Post-office and transport workers are not exactly fonctionnaires, but have similar rights and are so numerous that they have as much power over the government as fonctionnaires do.
Official statistics put the number of fonctionnaires at around 3.3 million. But one French magazine recently estimated that fonctionnaires or semi-fonctionnaires make up just over a quarter of the French workforce – six million workers. Whatever the figure, any government tries to reform the fonction publique at its peril. If it announces a plan to meddle with the éducation nationale, for example, there are not only a couple of million workers to go on strike, there are also all the students, who enjoy nothing better than a bit of educational rioting to prepare them for adult life.
And the worst fonctionnaires often have the best careers. It is well known that the only way to get rid of a totally inefficient fonction publique manager is to promote them so that they go and annoy a bigger department.
Fonctionnaire secretaries are the same. A friend of mine, a researcher, had a secretary who brought a TV into her office so that she could watch dubbed American soap operas in the afternoon. He complained to the head of department, who said there was nothing that could be done – if they annoyed her, all the secretaries in the institute would go on strike. My friend suffered for two years until he finally found another researcher who did so little work that he didn’t notice for six months that his previous secretary had retired. The TV-watcher filled that vacancy and my friend was saved.
Similarly, if the director of a school wants to get rid of a teacher who shows DVDs every lesson, gets drunk every lunchtime and regularly comes back two weeks late after the summer break, they will have to offer the offender a transfer to a school in a more prestigious part of France. I spent a year working as an English assistant in a lycée in Perpignan, and although some of the English teachers did give a damn about the kids, several others were only there for the Pyrenees skiing and the Mediterranean watersports. One typical lesson I attended involved the teacher putting on a Charlie Chaplin video (great for improving their English conversation skills), yelling at his pupils to shut up, and going to the staffroom for a smoke. Très éducatif. And the only thing that the school director could have done was try to persuade him to transfer to Saint-Tropez.
The fonctionnaires defend themselves by saying that in exchange for their jobs for life they get low pay and little chance of promotion. But the fonction publique can’t be that bad – a recent opening for an administrative assistant at the state’s institute for population studies, a job that did not even require the baccalauréat (equivalent to A levels), attracted more than eighty applicants, including several with doctorates.
A stress-free job is a temptation that no French person can
