France Does Away With 35 Hour Work Week

Awesome.

France’s ruling conservatives are celebrating the mothballing of what they’ve long derided as the most destructive legacy of Socialist rule: the 35-hour workweek. Late Wednesday, a government text gutting the left’s decade-old labor innovation was voted into law, provoking cheers from rightist politicians that France Inc. could now better fulfill one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s key campaign slogans: “work more to earn more.”

“Companies will at last be able to operate management policy based on a secure legal framework,” DaniÈle Giazzi, a labor specialist for the ruling Union for Popular Majority party (UMP). “It’s a remarkable advance for the economy.” France’s Labor Minister, Xavier Bertrand, the bill’s author, hailed an “historic” revision of a law conceived by the country’s “archaic” left, now in opposition. “It’s the end of the imposed 35-hour week,” he crowed.

Yet Bertrand’s own wording belied a glaring incongruity in the law: while it allows employers to demand that workers spend more time at work, 35 hours remains the reference length of the French workweek. That’s a smart move, since polls show the French are fond of the 35-hour week, and quashing it outright could prove unpopular.

If only Americans’ politicians were talking about “earning” instead of “taking.”