| > Empirical evidence suggest a reduction of work hours will NOT increase employment. See when France went from 39 hour workweeks to 35. There is much to be said about the legal work week in France. It has been badly misrepresented again and again. In most industries, the reduction of work hours was more than compensated by "annualization". That means that you must do 35 hours a week, not every week but as a mean value along the whole year. What's the result? Where people used to work 39 hours all year long, even when the activity was in a low cycle, an work paid overtime when activity was high, they now work 30 hours a week at times and up to 48 hours a week at other times, always paid the standard wage all year long. Furthermore, even the definition of "work hour" changed. For instance, in some industries people are now allowed to take a piss only 2 times a day instead of 4. In "sales" (actually, supermarket cashiers mostly), people are now "working" only while they're actually on duty (they used to be "working" while present on the premises); so they may be given "free time" for up to two or three hours during the day (there aren't many customers in shops for hours during the week), though they often have no other choice but wait at the workplace or the immediate vicinity because they haven't got time or resource to do anything else. So actually for a large part of the economy, going from 39 to 35 hours was quite a big improvement of productivity. What is usually represented abroad as a scandalous, quasi communist change was actually a boon for the "great capital". Further "adjustments" made to the system in the past 12 years by right wing governments have achieved the picture; though they still love to bad mouth "the 35 hours" (lazy leftists! profiteering socialists!), getting rid of the many "progresses" induced by this system is absolutely out of the question. This is, by the way, perfectly in line with the habit to ditch French (now dead) retirement law: "Lazy French retire at 60! Courageous Germans retire at 67!", while the truth is that French retire at 62.5 years, and German 62.7... > But 77% of the US economy is services. Many of these services don't always make sense economically. Is it for the best that so many Americans eat out almost every day? Sure, that creates demand for a lot of low wage jobs, then what? This sort of short-sighted insistence on GDP growth (more business! more jobs!) is toxic in the long term. Some of the basics tenets seriously need to be revised. |