Word: houres
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...classic example of what the French call a pétard mouillé - or soggy firecracker that fails to explode. Few of the expected changes to the 35-hour week have materialized since France's Conservative government passed a measure in July designed to make it easier for bosses to force their employees to work more. The move retained the 35-hour week as the nominal legal reference to undercut union protest, but then rendered it nonsensical by giving employers a free hand to set far longer work requirements. So far, however, bosses haven't seen fit to make such...
...revision was a purely ideological effort to undo a landmark Socialist law, and ignored the fact most companies and workers don't want to change the 35-hour arrangement," says Eric Heyer, an economist and deputy director of the French Economic Observatory in Paris. "And by allowing companies to calculate employee time worked on a yearly rather than strict weekly basis as the previous law required, the 35-hour law provides businesses with badly needed flexibility to adapt to evolving activity at lower cost...
Michaël Zenevre, general manager of AGCP, a 14-employee advertising and marketing company located near the city of Nancy in North-Eastern France, agrees. Zenevre says he doesn't plan on dumping the 35-hour arrangement anytime soon even though the shorter week initially hurt his and other companies financially and required long and often acrimonious negotiation with workers...
More crucially, perhaps, the 35-hour week's survival owes a lot to other measures the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has passed as part of its mantra of "work more to earn more." Key to that is a provision introduced in late 2007 that makes overtime more profitable to both companies and employers by waving taxes and social charges. The ironic result: bosses and workers now find they can have their 35-hour cake and eat 25% bonus time too. "Rather than increasing the set week to 37, 39, or 40 hours - and have to raise fixed salaries proportionally...
Indeed, large industrial groups such as carmakers Renault and PSA (which makes Peugeots and Citroëns) are now responding to the massive slow-down in the auto sector by temporarily closing plants and imposing stored or anticipated time off on workers under their retained 35-hour schemes. That may not be how employees had planned to use their time off, but it beats being laid...