Utopia Banished

The American Spectator ^ | 03/31/2005 | Shawn Macomber

[BJClinton]

Special Report
Utopia Banished

After seven years of rising unemployment, economic stagnation, and general malaise, French socialists' war against self-determinism ended in defeat last week when France's parliament rescinded a law that made it a crime to work more than 35 hours a week.

Essentially a lunatic scheme to create wealth sans labor, the law instituted a de facto lowest-common-denominator egalitarian society by shackling anyone with motivation to a sinking raft of bureaucrats and the lazy. In a sort of fiscal policy version of the Maginot Line, French socialists had argued that legally limiting the number of work hours would force companies to create millions of new jobs.

The actual effect was almost the exact opposite: French companies increasingly moved operations into Eastern European countries, where the work ethic has taken on new life since the fall of Communism. Necessary foreign capital from the United States and elsewhere dried up because, in the words of French International Investment Agency head Clara Gaymard, "The perception was that the French didn't want to work anymore." Unemployment consistently topped ten percent.

The law took on a Darwinian/progressive air when a 2003 heat wave killed 15,000 elderly French men and women while their families were on vacation and medical personnel were restricted from working overtime -- even to save lives.

Despite all this, nearly a million protesters turned out earlier this month to rail against the proposed hour changes. Unions went on strike, grinding parts of Paris to a halt. French socialist and communist lawmakers introduced more than 130 amendments to block or water down the repeal's reforms. A French woman told an Associated Press reporter moonlighting as a cheerleader -- he gushingly described the law as "a remarkable piece of social engineering" -- that she enjoyed her weekdays at the movies and museums so much she might quit her job as a loan company manager rather than work more hours. A socialist lawmaker, Alain Vidalies, described the reform apocalyptically as "economically absurd and socially unjust."

One has to wonder what sort of state the French psyche is in when the government has to contrive a media blitz, as Jacques Chirac's crack press department did in advance of the vote, entitled, "Work More to Earn More." Yet, sometimes logic is not enough to trump the sense of entitlement that a welfare state breeds.

"To make us believe that workers will be able to work more to earn more is a lie," a spokesman for the CFDT trade union, François Chereque, inexplicably told BFM radio, while former French Socialist labor minister Martine Aubry, the architect of the 35-hour law, had a public meltdown hysterically claiming that repeal would destroy 50 years of social progress.


NEVERTHELESS, THIS SHOULDN'T BE a debate on the merits or failings of either the free market or command economies. The real question is what should be the role of government in the working lives of individuals in a free society? After all, forcibly limiting individuals from doing whatever they choose with their lives, including setting their own working hours, is authoritarian on its face.

As the former French Industry Minister Alain Madelin has noted, such a law is "an attack on the freedom to work."

"What right does the state have to prevent someone who wants to work more and earn more from doing just that?" Madelin asked recently in a Mises Institute article.

If the French socialists and bureaucrats marching in the streets want to live out a utopian fantasy, let them find 35-hour-a-week jobs without of imposing them on everyone else. Not everyone wants a share in your collective, comrade. Strange as it may seem, some people find as much fulfillment in a career as others do from being wine drunk at a museum on a Monday morning in Paris. We should be free to choose, as Milton Friedman said.

With an aging population weighing down entitlements and low rates of economic growth -- less than 2 percent on average for more than a decade -- the status quo has become untenable.

"French are working less than others, 1,561 hours a year, or 20 percent less than Americans," Sylvain Charat, director of Policy Studies for the French think tank Eurolibnetwork pointed out in a Tech Central Station

article last September. "Furthermore not enough French are at work: 61 percent compared to 72 percent in the United States. And finally French work costs are 20 percent higher than the European Union average before enlargement, and 40 percent higher than the United States."


THE FRENCH ABOLITION MAY create a domino effect. It is sure at the very least to give a boost to German leader Gerhard Schroeder's official blueprint for ending his country's economic doldrums, Agenda 2010, which likewise proposes an end to the 35-hour work week.

So is it off to the salt mines for the poor people of Europe now? Hardly. The country remains a signatory to the European Union's Working Time Directive entitling workers to a work week ceiling of 48 hours, a minimum of one day off per week, and an annual paid holiday of four weeks.

Still, even these EU restrictions may be unworkable in any practical sense. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Ireland are all seeking "opt outs" for health care workers, while Luxembourg wants one for hotel workers.

Surely, what with pride Europeans take in their Workers' Paradises, it will be some time before we hear the end of the bellyaching over repeal of the 35 hour week. But it's about time so-called progressives were forced out of their self-righteous fog long enough to see that workers' rights include the right to work.


Shawn Macomber is a reporter and staff writer for The American Spectator. He runs the website Return of the Primitive.

[BJClinton]

she enjoyed her weekdays at the movies and museums so much she might quit her job as a loan company manager rather than work more hours.

That pretty much sums up socialism.

[2banana]

"French are working less than others, 1,561 hours a year, or 20 percent less than Americans," Sylvain Charat, director of Policy Studies for the French think tank Eurolibnetwork pointed out in a Tech Central Station

article last September. "Furthermore not enough French are at work: 61 percent compared to 72 percent in the United States. And finally French work costs are 20 percent higher than the European Union average before enlargement, and 40 percent higher than the United States."

What the French do have is high standards for filing lawsuits so that their economy is not dragged down by an out of control legal system. One of the huge weights holding the American economy back...

[ClaireSolt]

I think our balance of payments deficits would improve with better policies in Europe and Japan. We have been carrying economic recovery on our backs.

[BJClinton]

Amen to that! The problem is, of course, that one of our two political parties is entirely beholden to lawyers and unions.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Avoir Travail!

[Owl558]

The more you make the more they take. Opressive tax policies take the incentive out of hard work. It is socialism at its lethargic finest.

I particularly liked the woman who threatened to quit her job rather than have to work more that 35-hours. That says it all right there!

[BJClinton]

If I had the energy I'd look that up, what does it mean?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

An actual best selling title in France, "Hello, Laziness - The art and necessity of doing the minimum possible at work". The title is a take-off on a best selling 1950's French novel, "Hello, Loneliness".

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

If I had the energy I'd look that up, what does it mean?

Say "bonjour" to paresse. Paresse, met BJClinton, he doesn't have the energy to look you up.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

If I had the energy I'd look that up, what does it mean?

Apathy sucks.

[BJClinton]

Apathy sucks.

No kidding, takes way too much energy.

[Billthedrill]

I just don't care about apathy.

[BJClinton]

*shrugs*

[Choose Ye This Day]

What's the difference between ignorance, apathy, and indifference?

I don't know and I don't care one way or the other.