Off the Deep End; French Finance Minister Sarkozy wants to take on the 35-hour workweek. Is he daring, or just crazy?

Byline: Marie Valla and Eric Pape

How much can you change France? Or, more precisely, the French? Can you make them give up some of their state-funded privileges--which many see as government-given rights? Can you make them work longer hours, just for la gloire of competitiveness? France's frenetically energetic Finance minister, 48-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy, thinks so. Transparently ambitious, he's racing against the clock himself, looking first to usurp the leadership of President Jacques Chirac's political union this fall, then to take the presidency in 2007. And along the way he's out to prove to a famously fatalistic nation that change is indeed possible, even inevitable, if "Sarko" is the man in charge.

Barely 100 days into his tenure at the Finance Ministry, Sarkozy has focused on the most controversial pocketbook issue in French politics: the nation's 35-hour workweek. This revolutionary labor law, passed by the previous Socialist government, went into effect in 2000. It was supposed to be a panacea for the jobless, founded on the peculiarly European notion that if more people work less (but keep the same salaries as when they worked more) lots of good jobs will be created. "Time for me, work for others," was the slogan for this French version of voodoo economics.

Of course the measure didn't lower the unemployment rate, now around 10 percent; it just pleased those already on the job. It also hung an economic millstone around the neck of the French state, which has compensated businesses with huge tax breaks to help them adjust. "France will soon dedicate 16 billion euro per year to prevent people from working," Sarkozy told the French financial newspaper Les Echos last month. "We are the only country in the world that is in this situation."

Sarko was exaggerating a tad there. Neighboring Germany has already started facing up to similar illusions. There, as in the rest of Europe, the length of the workweek shrank steadily from 1970 to 2002, according to a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and employers have had enough. Two weeks ago Siemens threatened to move 2,000 jobs from Germany to Hungary if workers didn't agree to longer and more-flexible working hours. Despite several nationwide protests, the country's largest union, IG Metall, was forced to accept a deal pushing the week back up to 40 hours, from 35, with no increase in pay. "It's about market forces," says Paul Swaim, one of the OECD economists who worked on the survey. "Globalization is making everyone insecure, and that creates a difficult negotiating climate for workers in many countries."

For a lesser politician, Sarkozy's frontal attack on the philosophy of "less work means more jobs" and the legislation it spawned might be fatal. After all, how do you wean workers off what amounts to eight weeks of paid vacation a year? President Chirac, no fan of the law, has skirted the issue to avoid stirring up unrest. A slim majority of the French say they might go along with working a few more hours, but 60 percent think they ought to get more money for it--even if the alternative is forcing companies to relocate abroad.

Yet it's Sarko, not Chirac, who's topping the polls of conservative politicians. He says he wants to get the pain of change over with as quickly as possible, so that France can recover from the shock, and prosper. Pain there surely will be. Taking to the streets to protect perceived rights, even when they're more like perks, is a French tradition at least as old as Bastille Day. Sarkozy, who's got to find some way to kick-start the economy and ...