France presents contested reform to 35-hour workweek
France’s Socialist government has presented a contested labor market reform to amend the 35-hour workweek and relax other rules that has prompted street protests across France.
The bill was formally adopted Thursday at a Cabinet meeting and is to be discussed next month at parliament. Thousands of students and workers demonstrated in the streets of Paris and other major French cities to seek the withdrawal of the bill. Incidents between demonstrators and the police led to 15 arrests in Paris and 9 in Nantes, in western France, according to French authorities. Two cars were burned in the capital.
The government and businesses claim the reforms would help the economy by making it easier for companies to hire and fire workers. Currently, they say, some companies are reluctant to take on workers for fear they may not be able to downsize in times of financial trouble. France’s unemployment rate is hovering at 10 percent.
The protesters say the bill would badly damage employees’ rights. The proposal technically maintains the 35-hour workweek, which was conceived to fight joblessness by spreading work across more people, but allows companies to organize alternative working times. Those include a workweek of up to 48 hours and 12-hour days. In “exceptional circumstances,” employees could work up to 60 hours a week.
Myriam El Khomri, French labor minister, said the bill is “balanced, with new flexibility for the businesses in order to improve the competitiveness of our economy, as well as new protections, new rights for the employees”. The government tried to gain support from some worker unions by making a few changes in the bill last week. It has withdrawn measures that relaxed rules on working from home and at night and has introduced the control of a judge to ensure that multinational companies don’t organize the artificial bankruptcy of their French branch in order to justify layoffs.
Neil Turnbull, head of Turnbull Associes, a real estate management company that has 23 employees in its Paris office, told the AP the labor reform would “give us more comfort in recruiting. We need to know that we have some flexibility when workload drops to be able to reduce staff. We haven’t done that yet but it’s an important issue for us.”