A 35-hour work week?

This BBC article, written before yesterday’s Presidential election in France, reviews one of its issues: the 35-hour work week mandated by a previous Socialist government. This was one of the big factors in Conservative President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory, along with his promises to cut taxes and institute tougher penalties on crime.

It’s good to learn from others’ experiences. The 35-hour work week was instituted in France in 1997, in an effort to cut unemployment by sharing available work, while promoting more leisure/family time. But as the BBC reports, “Economists say employment is not a fixed quantity to be shared out. The best way to create jobs, they say, is growth – and France has very little of either. It has the slowest growth of any large EU economy and unemployment remains high….France’s European partners – notably Nordic countries – have moved in the opposite direction, making labour markets more flexible, and have seen their economies improve as a result.”

In the United States, a six-day work week was the norm until after World War I. Unions struggled for decades to win a full weekend for workers, finally succeeding during the Great Depression. One of the reasons Congress agreed was the very same desire to help corporations preserve jobs by spreading work across more workers. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 included a 44-hour standard work week; the 40-hour limit didn’t come until 1940. During World War II, “normal” work hours rose to maximize production for the war effort. Now, an Indiana University report notes, “According to a recent survey by Expedia.com, 63 percent of Americans work more than 40 hours a week, with some 40 percent exceeding the 50-hour a week mark. More than $21 billion dollars in vacation time goes unused annually (and back to employers!), as we spend 2.5 more weeks—and three months more—at work than do our Japanese and western European counterparts, respectively.”

Here, one reason employers prefer to pay overtime rather than hire more workers is health care costs. It’s cheaper for them to pay premium hourly rates for a few workers than to cover 10 – 20% annual cost inflation in health care premiums for more employees. That’s not a factor in France, which like every other country in Western Europe has universal health care coverage.

On many units at OHSU, nurses and other staff work 12-hour shifts, with three per week (36 hours) considered full time. I know several City of Portland employees who work four 10-hour days instead of the traditional Monday-Friday schedule. Flexible hours can work well for both employees and customers. I’m glad my unit at OHSU has stayed with the 8-hour schedule, because I love working the 3-11:30 p.m. timeframe. In 12-hour shifts, my choice would be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. or 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., neither of which fits the needs of a non-morning person with children in school very well. I greatly prefer the US system of regulating hours-before-overtime, rather than setting a mandatory cap on total hours worked. It will be interesting to see what changes are made in France over the next few months and years, and how they work out.

Two other interesting notes: the turnout in the election in France was 84%. Perhaps voting on Sundays, the workers’ traditional day off, allowed more people the time to go to the polls. And President-elect Sarkozy is an immigrant from Hungary, not a native Frenchman. He is known to be strongly pro-American, but as the International Herald-Tribune notes, “Widely criticized in France for his strong pro-American sentiments, Sarkozy sought in his acceptance speech to strike a balanced approach to the United States. Addressing France’s “American friends,” he said, “I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.” He specifically criticized the United States for obstructing the fight against global warming, which he said would be a high priority.”