Lhe desire of Emmanuel Macron and the right to delay the retirement age is based, beyond the question of financing, on the conviction that in order to have stronger economic growth, making it possible to reduce unemployment, should work more.
This conviction has a strong ally: economic theory, and in particular microeconomics, considered the hard core of the discipline. This teaches that, for a given state of technology and demography, the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country depends on the degree of mobilization of its productive resources, in particular labour. This is called the “production possibility frontier”. So, if we lengthen working hours, we increase GDP.
And if we increase the number of civil servants, it will be as many labor resources that companies will miss, which, if we are to believe this theory, are the only ones to innovate and truly create wealth. Hence, for twenty years, the attempts or decisions to question the 35-hour working day, to tax overtime to encourage employees to work more, to raise the retirement age, to combine employment and retirement , limitation, or even reduction, of taxes which leave many public services exhausted…
This reasoning calls for four remarks. If it were enough to extend working hours to increase a country’s GDP, and therefore its economic power, all governments would have done so a long time ago, starting with dictatorial regimes! But we can’t find any of that. On the contrary, the reduction of working time is a long history of social demand and public intervention, for two centuries, common to all developed countries.
The facts contradict the theory
In reality, nothing prevents employers from extending working hours if necessary by resorting to overtime. For labor law, this recourse is an employer prerogative, but also a legal obligation: the employee who refuses commits a contractual fault liable to sanction. Thus, the famous 40-hour week of the Popular Front, so decried at the time, was restored in February 1946. However, it did not prevent the rapid reconstruction of the country, nor the exceptional growth of the “glorious thirty”. In 1965, the effective duration of work was, all employees combined, forty-six hours per week, ie an overrun of 15% of the legal duration. Lowering the legal duration of work has nothing decreasing, except to prohibit overtime.
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