The Decline of France

This is a must read for all of the fellow wackos out there. Actually, it's a really damn good read for just anyone. Gives you a good idea of what our country would look like if Howard Dean or Ralph Nader got elected.

Legislation passed by the Socialist government in 1998--amidst a great deal of continental philosophizing about "the end of work"--produced a statutory work week of 35 hours. Baverez keenly notes that in the 1930s, France's left-wing Popular Front passed a similar réduction du temps de travail. Indeed, its association with the Popular Front gave a powerful boost to the 35-hour work week during the debates five years ago. (The otherwise admirable tendency of the French to root for underdogs has led them to look at the Popular Front's defeat at the hands of domestic--and later foreign--fascism as evidence of its superior morality, not of its inferior strength.)

The short week was meant to spread limited jobs around; it wound up doing the opposite, serving as what Baverez calls a "weapon of mass destruction for industrial production and employment." Today France has the highest youth unemployment in Europe, at 26 percent; only 37 percent of its over-55 population works, a world low. Its employment rate of 58 percent is at the bottom of the developed world. (The figure is 62 percent in the European Union and 75 percent in the United States.) And this grim employment picture is worsened--some would even say caused--by a political inequity. Over the past decade, public-sector employees have been able to enrich themselves in ways that private-sector ones cannot. Government employees can retire after 37.5 years on the job, versus 40 for private workers; they get 75 percent of their salary as a pension, versus 62 percent in the private sector; and the salary in this calculation is based on the best-paid six months for government workers, versus an average of their last 25 years for workers in private industry. So the latter wind up subsidizing the former.

I know at least a few young folks who love the idea of a mandatory 35-hour workweek. Lots of America's youth still romanticizes Socialism. It's kind of frightening. Chalk it up to the unchallenged stranglehold that the Left has on academia.