I should preface my response to Keith by observing that the French government's "scrapping" of the 35-hour week may turn out to be one of the all-time great empty gestures. It's likely that there will be little in the way of roll-backs of successfully implemented 35-hour weeks and it's possible that the intransigents would have found some way of evading compliance or sabotaging the outcomes if they couldn't. Revoking the legal requirement now may not be such a bad thing -- for the French -- although it may be one of those incoherent "lessons" held up for ever after by Anglo-American know-nothingism as a warning against any deviation from the One True Path.
Keith Hudson wrote, > I'm all in favour of shorter working weeks for anybody who wants them. But > shorter working hours will only create jobs to take up the numbers of the > unemployed if: > > (a) the weekly pay is cut; (a) has some short-term plausibility. However over the longer term shorter work time enables productivity gains that result in both shorter hours and higher earnings. I'm not convinced that the French 35-hour law built the best possible bridge between short term and long term. But there *were* subsidies to employers in the form of payroll tax reductions. The French policy was not the best possible policy, but it was one hell of a lot better than U.S. or U.K. policy. One hell of a lot better -- and that's one reason it was so vigorously attacked by the right. If successful, the policy may have hinted that there were alternatives to There Is No Alternative neo-liberalism. Can't have that. It is difficult to work out practical solutions to policy implementation when opposition is profoundly ideological and irrational, as is the opposition to shorter work time. As Gerhard Bosch's subtitle to an article on work time reductions in Europe exclaims, "It's not just a question of 'whether' but also of 'how'!" Employers' lobby groups are not interested in "how", they are adamant about "not". There is a very long tradition of this ideological opposition to shorter work time, just as there is a long history of ideological advocacy of shorter work time by organized labour. And there is a simple explanation: oversupply of labour gives employers a bargaining advantage (both with unions and with government when it comes to pork barrel subsidies, regulatory concessions and tax breaks in the name of "job creation"); a tight labour market gives employees (and unions) a bargaining advantage. Either advantage, if pursued to the extreme, can ultimately be to the detriment of all. Gerhard Bosch: "In most industrialized countries 120 years ago, average working time was around 3000 hours per year. Since then, average working time has declined by almost 50% (Table 1). Hourly productivity in the US, for example, is now approximately thirteen times higher and wages have risen ninefold, if we take gross domestic product per capita as a rough indicator of the evolution of wages, in the absence of any other data. From the perspective of our great-grandfathers, therefore, Americans work part-time for nine times the wage they earned. The pattern of development has been broadly similar in the other developed industrial economies... "It is generally taken for granted that, without reductions in working time, the productivity gains of the past 150 years would have led to high and persistent levels of unemployment (Dr�ze 1986:36, Hicks 1946: 301). However, what is regarded as self-evident over the long term is controversial in the short term." > (b) the unemployed have the necessary skills to take the surplus jobs created. (b) is circular to the extent that the unemployed can best attain the necessary skills on the job. "Skills training" is nonsensical in the absence of job openings. Sure, employers would like to have all their training costs subsidized by only ever having to hire employees who already have the necessary skills. In Canada, the skills/employment mismatch runs predominately in the direction of people having surplus skills that they are not able to use on the job. > To quote the example given by The Guardian (as left-wing as any newspaper > in England can be), this is why the French labour minister Martine Aubry > was thrown out -- because she represented a working class electorate who > were impoverished by her and Lionel Jospin's legislation. Well, if the Guardian is so left-wing, it must be true. Not being an expert on the 2002 French election, I won't hazard an analysis of exactly why the Socialists lost. I seem to recall a fellow name Le Pen, three far left presidential candidates and one regional candidate who bled support from Jospin's insipid campaign and a general disillusionment with the right/left cohabitation. I had been led to believe (apparently mistakenly) that the French voted against 1. LePen and 2. political impasse. But if the left-wing Guardian attributes the whole thing to the idiocy of the 35-hour law, who am I to imagine otherwise?
