two steps forward, one step back
France
Lionel Jospin's Socialist Party government is preparing legislation that will introduce the 35hour week as of 1 January 2000. Both sides in the class struggle know this is a victory for France's social movements. Michel Husson
This unexpected promise from the Prime Minister reflects the progressive exhaustion of each neo-liberal explanation for unemployment. After 15 years of increasing flexibility and reducing labour costs, unemployment is higher than ever.
The result is growing political and demand. Shortening the working week without cutting wages would boost consumption, providing that new jobs were created to fill the hours "saved.'
This new distribution of income could be financed through extra taxes on financial revenues, precisely protits that have swollen so quickly thanks to the combination of flexibility and wage restraint. In macro-economic terms, this would represent a transfer of revenue from "rentiers" (those who live on unearned income or profits from their investments) to wage-earners. This would boost consumption, which would lead to economic growth.
France * 35-hour week must be introduced without loss of pay has progressively gained ground within the movement, and has even been accepted, in principle, by the Jospin government.
But workers' main hesitation to the project comes from scepticism that new jobs will really be created to fill the hours 'saved.' After all, reducing working hours without creating new jobs to compensate would mean increasing the pressure on the workforce - doing the same job in less time. Since workers are already feeling the pressure of a massive drive to intensify their labour, they are particularly sensitive to this problem with the 35-hour week.
practical opposition to the traditional IT'S A SIMPLE PERSONALITY TEST recipes of the French National Employers' DESIGNED TO SIMULATE ACTUAL Council (CNPF), the main employers' organisation. They protest that reducing labour time without cutting salaries will discourage enterprises from investing. The problem is that the share of wages as part of total added value has fallen from 69 to 60% during the past 10 years, and investment is no higher than before. What has increased is the rate of non-reinvested profit, particularly financial revenues.
The last decade has seen a steady increase in labour productivity, chiefly through intensifying work processes. But workers have seen none of the benefits — salaries are blocked, in real terms, and the number of working hours is just as high as in 1982.
According to the Labour Ministry, "general indicators illustrate, unambiguously, the overall situation facing French companies. Financial constraints on enterprises have been loosened, and companies now make investment decisions mainly on the basis of their chances of finding a market for their products."
In other words, it is not just fair, but economically efficient to re-establish a redistribution of income that gives a bit more to labour. This will not reduce investment, which is stagnating in part because salaries are not increasing fast enough to allow workers to buy new goods!
The emplovers' federation's second objection to the 35-hour week is competitiveness. Increasing labour costs would reduce companies' share of the market, and this would create unemployment, they argue.
In fact, increased wage expenditures could easily be compensated for by a reduction in financial costs. After years of importing more than it exported, France now has an almost 2% trade surplus.
This provides considerable manoeuvring room for reorienting the economy towards satisfying domestic
WORKING CONDITIONS...
### LOGIST
The problem is that even if the economy grows by 3% a year for five years (i.e. twice as fast as in the past half decade), this will only reduce employment by 0.33% annually, from the current 12.5 to 11% by 2002. So the only way to reduce unemployment created by years of anti-worker policies would be through a massive, and rapid reduction in working hours, with creation of new jobs to compensate. Sceptical workers
The employers are not the only ones sceptical about the 35-hour week. It is important that the social movement and the left also respond frankly to concerns some workers have about the project and its implications.
For example: if the reduction in working hours is accompanied by a proportionate cut in salary (from 39 to 35 hours is a 10% reduction) then we would be sharing unemployment, rather than sharing work. And no-one is going to join us in a campaign for reducing salaries, particularly when such a large proportion of the workforce is earning very low wages.
Not surprisingly, the insistence that the
The only way to win support for the project, and implement it successfully, is to have a real control over the creation of the new compensatory jobs.
For the above reasons, the workers' movement has gradually (though to a varying degree accepted the idea that the 35-hour week should be introduced via legislation (rather than by negotiations with the employers).
This, of course, is particularly unacceptable to the employers. Instead, they argue for the complete elimination of the concept of a legal working week, so that management can hire people to work whatever hours they choose. Jospin's limits
The government's proposals are a step forward. But there are several ambiguities. First of all, the proposed implementation is much too slow. The shift to a 35-hour week is justified on the basis of past increases in productivity that were not compensated for by wage increases. To delay implementation of the 35-hour week is to finance the reduction from future pay increases, which will not take place, or from future productivity increases. This could
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* The 35 hour week in Europe mean creating less new jobs than the number of hours saved calls for. The workforce would work harder, and their working conditions would worsen.
The state's proposals for aid to companies that begin to reduce the working week before the year 2000 reinforce these fears. Companies will benefit from reduced employer payments to social security if they reduce working hours by 10%, and employ new workers to fill 60% of the hours saved. The remaining 40% of the hours saved will be made unnecessary by increases in workers' productivity. In other words, paid for by the workers, and not reducing unemployment.
This plan is a step backwards. Particularly since the previous, conservative government had already introduced the
‹obien Law, which offered state aid to companies that cut working hours by 10%, providing they created new jobs to fill all the hours 'saved.'
This is not a minor mathematical dispute, but a major social question. It affects the number and type of new jobs that will be created, and raises the question of the extent to which workers will supervise and influence the creation of these new jobs. Who will pay?
One strange omission from the pilot project is any mention of how the plan will be paid for. In this sense, the various proposals from the labour movement are more "responsible," since they do say where the money should come from. The Communist-led CGT trade union confederation, the large radical minority in the CFDT confederation, and the project proposed by a number of Labour Inspectors all suggest the creation of a compensation fund, to be financed through the savings made by the unemployment insurance system, and a new tax on financial revenues.
No miracles are forthcoming. It will not be possible to create jobs, maintain current salaries, preserve favourable investment conditions and guarantee rentiers their current, bloated revenues.
In principle, there is no problem with state compensation of companies that introduce a shorter working week. But not if the way the state finances this aid means the final bill is paid by workers, rather than the rentiers.
At the moment, these budgetary questions are still a mystery. This may mean the government does intend to create many new jobs, but doesn't want to say how this will be paid for. Or it might mean the government is not planning to create many new jobs at all, which means no budget problems, but also abandoning the proposal to cut labour time. What the law doesn't say
The law confines itself to a very narrow part of the problem. For instance, it has no provisions to limit, or at least prevent, state subsidy of precarious contracts and part-time work, which in practice 32 International Viewpoint #297 discriminates heavily against women, who form 85% of the part-time workforce [See "The feminisation of underemployment," by Myosotis Walner, International Viewpoint #296, January 1998]
The Jospin plan will exempt companies with less than 20 employees (i.e. most workplaces) from implementing the 35-hour week until 2002. This will obviously encourage larger enterprises to sub-contract production to these firms. This measure effectively creates a two-tier workforce in the private sector. And yet, since workers in smaller companies face the worst conditions, they should have increased legal protection.
Public sector workers are not covered at all by the current proposals.
It is not clear what legal regulations will govern overtime work once the 35hour week is introduced. Nor does the Jospin plan say anything about the maximum period people can be obliged to work - for the moment this is fixed at 48 hours/week, in line with the European Union directive on this issue. Europeanise the movement!
The best way to make this plan coherent would be for Jospin to propose that it be applied to all European countries. Since European countries trade much more with each other than with the rest of the world, it would end all objections about the 35-hour week reducing competitiveness. This would open the way towards reducing unemployment internationally, without price wars.
After all, reducing the work week is a profoundly co-operative project. The more countries adopt the 35 hour work week, the more effective it will be. Protests against the closure of the Renault plant in Vilvorde, Belgium (and shifting production to a Renault factory in Spain, where wages are lower demonstrated how the reduction of working hours in a coordinated way can be a coherent and popular strategy for opposing management's attempts to increase competition between workers in different factories within the same enterprise.
The recent success of Italy's Refounded Communists (Rifondazione) in forcing their government to adopt a plan for the 35-hour week shows the potential for spreading these demands, and wining
France now faces long negotiations on Jospin's Framework Law. But the real challenge is not over legal niceties; it is to go into workplaces, housing projects, trade union meetings, and everywhere else where workers, together with unemployed groups, need to start preparing their own plans for reducing labour time, using the government's proposal as an opening, a springboard. Now that the 35-hour week is on the agenda, we need to give it a positive content. To make it as pro-labour as possible, and a powerful weapon against Europe-wide unemployment. * Source: Reprinted from the Belgian magazine Avancées