Quotes of the Day

This time of year, work is the last thing on the minds of most Europeans. The E.U. mandates a minimum of four weeks holiday, guaranteeing a traditional summer exodus to beaches and mountains. When France adopted the 35-hour workweek in 2000, many employers met the requirement by simply adding to their employees' annual holiday allowances. It's not uncommon to find French workers with enough time to take both July and August off from work — paid, of course.

Yet just as summer holidays come into full swing, the 35-hour week itself looks like it might get a permanent vacation. Back in 2000, France's Socialist government promised shorter weeks would create jobs. Working fewer hours, it argued, would require more workers to complete a task. Using that noble yardstick, the measure hasn't performed especially well: France's unemployment rate today is 9.8%, compared to 9.6% when the law came into force. Employers and some politicians have been attacking the measure for years, but now the 35-hour week may have met its match. More and more employers in France, Germany and the Netherlands are giving their workers a stark choice: agree to longer hours or wave goodbye to your job as it migrates to another country.

Last week, an overwhelming majority of the 820 employees of auto-parts maker Robert Bosch who work at a Bosch factory near Lyons voted to give up their 35-hour week in return for a guarantee that their jobs would not be moved to Eastern Europe. "Everyone had come to accept the fatality of it — either they approved it or they lost their jobs," says Serge Truscello, a Bosch employee and union leader at the plant.

In June, workers at two Siemens mobile-phone factories in Germany agreed to extend their workweek from 35 to 40 hours with no extra pay in order to keep 2,000 jobs from being shifted to Hungary. That created a copycat effect, as other German companies demanded worker concessions at their own factories. DaimlerChrysler threatened to move 6,000 jobs if workers at its Mercedes factories didn't swallow a €500 million cost-cutting package. Workers walked off the job at first, but agreed to the deal last week. The German department-store chain Karstadt-Quelle last week asked its 47,000 employees to work up to five extra hours a week without additional pay; the union said it suspected "concerted action" by employers to extend working hours. Travel operator Thomas Cook boosted hours for its employees in Germany from 38.5 to 40 per week.

And in the Netherlands, office-supplies producer Smead Europe announced that it was increasing its 36-hour week to 40 hours with no extra pay. Smead said the move — affecting 180 of its 230 employees — was necessary to improve the company's competitive position. Not surprisingly, the union at the Smead factories, C.N.V. Dienstenbond, took a different view — it said the move was illegal. "If Smead goes ahead with the 40-hour workweek on Aug. 1, it can expect a summons the same day," says union leader Siegbert van der Velde.

Plenty of Europeans already pull long hours. More than 10 million German employees put in more than 40 hours a week, according to the government. But for the past 30 years, the average European workweek has been shrinking, and falling behind its American and Asian rivals. According to Paul Swaim, an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (o.e.c.d.) in Paris, since 1970 average working hours have declined 23% in France and 17% in Germany, while rising 20% in the United States and Canada. According to a recent o.e.c.d. labor market study, workers in France averaged 1,453 hours per year while German workers averaged 1,446. But workers in Britain averaged 1,673 hours per year and U.S. workers averaged 1,792 hours.

As supporters of the 35-hour week are quick to point out, there's nothing intrinsically virtuous about working more hours. French workers may log fewer hours than their British counterparts, but the French are more productive; Czechs put in more hours than any other European workers, and yet they're among Europe's least productive. And while French unions and employers bitterly disagree about the job impact of the official 35-hour week, there's some evidence to suggest that at least the law hasn't harmed employment levels; there are an estimated 24.1 million jobs today vs. 23.1 million in 2000. "The most complete and objective studies I've seen indicate that around 50,000 new, durable jobs were created by the 35-hour week," says Marc Touati, chief economist for Natexis Banques Populaire.

Yet there's no question that the May accession of 10 new countries with wages well below the E.U. average has accelerated the attack on the 35-hour week. Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of Medef, France's employers' association, said the 35-hour week "is not just a slippery slope, it's a toboggan toward economic decline."

If that's true, laborers are being forced off the sled. Bosch workers voted overwhelmingly to accept 12% cost savings at the factory in Vénissieux, a Lyons suburb. The company had warned they faced the transfer of 300 jobs to the Czech Republic. The workers accepted a 36-hour workweek (up from 35 hours) at the same pay, as well as agreeing to limit salary increases to 1% annually over the next three years. They also agreed to cut extra pay for working night shifts, recalculate company-paid vacations and give up a public holiday. Jean Le Garrec, a Socialist member of parliament, said the Bosch deal was the result of "employees struggling, rage in their hearts, to save their jobs."

Does the Bosch move mean France's 35-hour week is dead? Technically, no. The concession Bosch squeezed out of its workers falls within guidelines hammered out last year by the government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin that allow for unions and companies to reach their own agreements. And for now, President Jacques Chirac says he favors "more negotiated flexibility" for the workweek, but opposes changing the 35-hour law. (His Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has gone further, calling the law "perverse" and arguing it should be changed for "those who want to work more in order to earn more.")

But, as a practical matter, the 35-hour week now seems to have little sway over many large employers. Workers in Germany are fighting a tide of proposed deals involving threats to export jobs. When DaimlerChrysler said it would move 6,000 jobs from a factory at Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart, to plants in northern Germany and South Africa unless workers agreed to wage concessions, it wasn't bluffing. So autoworkers' union IG Metall agreed to give up a 2.8% pay rise in 2006 in exchange for a job guarantee until 2012. The company's 15,000 research and development employees will also work a 40-hour week instead of the current 35 hours. Automaker Opel is now thinking of increasing its workweek at its factory near Essen in western Germany.

Leading German politicians expressed outrage at the hard-line employer tactics. "Germany's future does not lie in low wages," fumed Franz Müntefering, chairman of the ruling Social Democratic party. Some politicians demanded that executives at companies give up part of their salary before demanding wage cuts, as happened at Lufthansa three years ago. "The managers in the higher floors should give up 10% of their own pay," said Kurt Beck, head of the state of Rheinland-Pfalz. "That would be a signal to employees." DaimlerChrysler did just that; the company's management board — headed by chief executive Jürgen Schrempp, who earned €7.5 million last year — agreed to give back 10% of its salary as part of the settlement. Will the attempts at forced executive givebacks make Europe's workers more willing to accept longer hours? It's too early to tell. But workers know employers are more than willing to move factories to lower-cost countries — Siemens alone has moved 71,000 jobs abroad since 1993. So it seems likely that when bosses and workers and politicians alike return from their summer holidays, resolving the 35-hour workweek will be on everyone's to-do list.

• CHARLES P. WALLACE | BERLIN
• Can Europe afford a 35 hour week?