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Sharing the work in France

French President Francois Mitterrand's plan to cut his country's unemployment rate seemed engagingly simple. If employees worked fewer hours, jobs could be spread among more people. Mitterrand's Socialist administration has thus pared France's 40-hour work week to 39 hours since taking office more than two years ago, and it plans to trim it to 35 hours by 1985. The government has also given the French a fifth week of annual vacation and has lowered the legal retirement age to 60 for workers who have labored 371/2 years.

So far, however, the work-sharing scheme has fallen well short of expectations. Although planners had predicted the moves would quickly create 70,000 jobs, an independent study released in May put the actual number of new positions at between 15,000 and 30,000. "We found that there is a very weak link between the reduction in the work week and increased employment," said Economist Olivier Marchand, one of three authors of the study. Some two-thirds of the 3,700 firms surveyed said they had not added a single new worker since the work week was shortened. Meanwhile, the French unemployment rate has risen from 7.2% when the Socialists came to power in May 1981 to 8.3% in July.

The study contends that French workers have foiled the plan by refusing to take pay cuts to go with the shorter hours. That has left companies without new funds to hire additional people. Some European observers argue that such an outcome should have been expected. Says P.O. Klandermans, a social psychologist at Amsterdam's Free University: "Employees may take wage cuts to avoid layoffs, but that is maintaining existing jobs, not creating new ones. I've never heard workers say that they were willing to take home less pay to create new jobs for someone else."

The work-sharing plan may actually be worsening France's economic problems. One official estimate indicates that the measures lowered France's 1982 growth rate by .2%, to 1.7%, and accounted for .6% of its 11.9% inflation. Peugeot, the country's second largest automobile manufacturer, lost about $325 million last year, and blames the reduction in hours for some of that deficit. Peugeot said the scheme added $200 million to its labor bill last year, because the company has been getting less work performed even though wages went up some 11%.

Other countries are closely monitoring the French plan. Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy have launched similar attacks on unemployment. "Everyone in Europe is watching France as a pioneer in work sharing," says Susan Binns, an official with the European Community in Brussels. "The French have gone farther and faster than anyone else."

Work sharing, however, seems so far to be more successful in the U.S., where it is voluntary, than in Europe, where it is official policy. During the last recession, 134,275 workers in Arizona, California and Oregon participated in work-sharing programs that permitted them to get partial unemployment-insurance payments. An employee who works 20% fewer hours may thus lose only 8% of total compensation. At Signetics, a California electronics firm, some 4,000 employees spent fewer hours on the job in 1981 to avoid layoffs. Last year about 2,000 workers took part in the program.

French officials insist that their plan will eventually succeed, but they now make fewer claims about its potential as a simple solution for unemployment. Says Finance Minister Jacques Delors: "Work sharing should not be considered the principal instrument in the struggle against unemployment but rather an important tool." Concurs Michel Sailly, a spokesman for the pro-Socialist Confederation Franc,aise D&3233;mocratique du Travail, France's second largest union: "We realize that continuing on our path to the 35-hour week is not the only answer to unemployment, but it is still an important part of the solution." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.