January 18, 2012
Morning Edition did a segment this morning on the 35 hour work week in France. To show how bad the 35 hour work week is, the segment told listeners that hospital workers had accumulated 2 million days worth of overtime, which they will have to take as days off by the end of 2012. It warned that this would force hospitals to shut down for months at a time.
Most listeners would have little ability to assess the risk from taking this many days of leave since they probably don’t have much idea of how big France’s hospital sector is. In the United States the hospital sector employs 4.8 million workers. If the sector in France is proportional to the size of its employed workforce, then France has approximately 1.2 million workers in the hospital sector. This means that if everyone uses their days off (workers in the U.S. often lose days of paid leave), they will have to take an average of 1.7 extra days off in 2012. Is that scary or what?
The piece also included the completely unsourced assertion that few people believe that the 35 hour work week has led to increased employment by dividing up jobs. The people who do not believe that the shorter work week created jobs must believe that the 35 hour work week led to sharp increases in productivity. If workers can produce the same amount in 35 hours as they did in 39 hours (the previous standard work week in France), it would imply an 11 percent increase in productivity.
This would be an astonishing gain in productivity. Economists view productivity as the primary determinant of living standards. Productivity growth is the whole point of all those great plans for tax cuts (usually for rich people) that people like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Paul Ryan keep throwing on the table. If NPR’s sources are correct in their view, and shorter work weeks lead to massive gains in productivity (none of the tax cut bills are projected to lead to productivity gains of even one-fifth this size), then shorter work weeks could be a great way to both increase equality and improve growth: a classic win-win situation.
[Addendum: The transcript is now available. It seems that the 2 million days referred to a single hospital in Paris, not the entire hospital system.]
[Addendum 2: Andrew Watt has a more serious discussion of the impact of the 35-hour work week in France.
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