France’s working-time law, the loi Aubry, did more than shorten the working week. It made firms with more than 20 employees renegotiate their labour contracts, and most of them traded shorter average hours for the right to schedule staff unevenly across the year.
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The law began in June 1998 and became mandatory for large employers in January 2000. Martine Aubry, the Socialist minister it is named after, pushed it through while her government shared power with a centre-right president. Its stated aims were to cut unemployment and to give companies more flexibility over labour. Unemployment had peaked at 12.4% in 1997.
Why “35 hours” rarely meant 35 hours
The law let a firm calculate its staff’s hours as a yearly average rather than a weekly fixed number, a practice the French call annualisation. A company could schedule long weeks when demand was high and short ones when it was not, so long as the total worked out to roughly 1,607 hours a year.
Samsonite’s factory workers agreed to 42-hour weeks each summer, when suitcase demand peaks, in exchange for 32-hour weeks in winter. At Carrefour, the supermarket chain, cashiers agreed to shift their hours and duties to match how many customers were in the store at any given time.
At EDF, the state-controlled electricity firm, a 1999 deal let some staff work a 32-hour week, and state auditors found in 2013 that EDF staff averaged 1,570 hours a year, well under the 1,607-hour national benchmark.
Who gained the least
Restaurants and trucking, where the work cannot be sped up or moved to a quieter month, gained little from the trade. Employees there already worked long hours, and the shorter week only raised labour costs without a matching gain in flexibility.
Small businesses pushed back too. Firms with fewer than 20 employees only had to comply from 2002, and France’s own economy minister, Laurent Fabius, argued for softer terms for them. The Ministry of Employment refused, offering tax breaks instead.
Did it create jobs
Officials at the time credited the law with only about a fifth of the jobs created in that period, and most economists think its share was smaller still. Eric Heyer of the Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques later cited official figures crediting the law with 350,000 new jobs. That fell short of the two million its architects had hoped for, but as he put it, “not nothing.”
By 2012, government researchers found that actual hours worked by full-time staff in France averaged 39.5 a week, as companies used overtime and the law’s flexibility rules to push real hours back up. The number in the law’s name had become a starting point for negotiation, not a ceiling.
