On a recent weekday, Saifi Ahlem caught a 5 a.m. Métro to get to her job as a passengers’ assistant at Orly Airport, where she often works 44 hours a week — well over France’s official 35-hour workweek. That afternoon, she took a quick lunch break then headed to her second job, as a sales manager at the French hypermarket Carrefour, ending her day at 9 p.m. “France has a reputation for having lazy workers,” said Ahlem, 26. “But I’ve never worked just 35 hours. That would be like resting on my laurels.” More than a decade after it was introduced, the 35-hour workweek still projects an image of France as being one of the most laid-back places in the world to work. In most of the rest of the eurozone, the 40-hour workweek is standard.

But in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 per cent higher than the eurozone average. 
All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Now, a fight has broken out within President François Hollande’s Socialist government over whether to officially end the nominal 35-hour workweek as a way to overcome France’s economic malaise.

Breaking a taboo, Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron has begun to openly question whether the measure - which was passed in 2000 by a Socialist government to encourage job creation — still serves the country’s needs. Companies were expected to recruit more employees to compensate for the reduced hours for any one worker. While the French statistics agency Insee estimates that 300,000 to 350,000 jobs were created shortly after the law was passed, economists said that the pace of jobs creation had not been maintained. And critics say the rule is a reason that France’s unemployment rate is more than double Germany’s rate of 5 percent.

Abolishing the law would require a wholesale review of the exemptions and subsidies now in place, said Jean-François

Roubaud, the president of the CPGME, France’s main employers’ association for small and medium-size businesses, leading to “major difficulties.” For the moment, his association is resigned to keeping the 35-hour workweek in place — as long as Macron follows through on his promise to provide employers with more flexibility.

NYTNS