• France.Macron plays his mandate in the mother of all reforms, retirement

The 35 hours turn 20 years in silence and inference. The oven for buns is not present, kidnapped today by a transport strike in protest against the retirement reform. It started last day 5 and you can leave the French without trains at Christmas.

The socialists, drivers of the reduction in working hours, have returned to the streets for the first time in years and years. But they are invisible and inaudible, jarrized at the polls and polls up to 5-6% by the emergence of Emmanuel Macron. His last redoubts of power are some mayorships. Among them, Paris ( Anne Hidalgo ) and Lille, where Martine Aubry , the minister who pushed the law forward, is represented for the fourth time.

The studies attribute the creation of 350,000 jobs to the reduction in working time. But there are doubts among economists. No country followed France along this path, the last social conquest set in motion by social democracy. In fact, the Germans have thrown the opposite way and the ' Schröder agenda reduced the cost of labor.

The Socialists had come to power in 1997 more by failures of the right than by their own merits. President Jacques Chirac , a Gaullist, had made a fatal mistake in the winter of 95: reforming social security. Then, as today, the railroad responded with a strike. Three weeks later, Prime Minister Alain Juppé withdrew the project.

The executive, still with a majority in the Assembly, was touched. The legislatures had to take place in 98 but Chirac, seeing that his popularity was decreasing, decided to dissolve early.

What he anticipated was the victory of the left. Chirac had no choice but to appoint Prime Minister Lionel Jospin , a socialist with a Troskist past, serious and firm in his social democratic beliefs.

Boost to reduction

He formed a government with communists and leftist radicals whose number two was the Minister of Labor, Martine Aubry . The lighthouse measure was the reduction of weekly work to 35 hours without reduction of wages. This was already on the program with which François Mitterrand won the elections in 1981. In power, he dropped from 40 to 39 hours per week.

Jospin and Aubry finished the job. There was a first law ( Aubry 1 ) that encouraged companies to participate and another ( Aubry 2 ), voted on December 15, 1999, which made the new day mandatory on January 1, 2000. It was accompanied by two winks to employers: a decrease in employer contributions and the annual calculation of hours worked.

Passengers in a Paris station during the transport strike last week.

The idea was the distribution of work . And the theory is that many jobs would be created. The most fans came to talk about two million, but the statistics service of the Ministry of Labor put it at 350,000 jobs. Economists of all trends attribute it mainly to the decline in prices.

Proponents of the measure argue that salary costs have increased the same as the average for the Eura area. But the fact is that BNP and other large French banks have relocated tens of thousands of jobs in Lisbon and Porto.

Effects on workers

Annualization in the calculation of hours and flexibility in the organization of work produced disparate effects at both ends of the labor population.

The cadres and the liberal professions continued to work much longer days and transformed the 35 hours into 10 days of extra vacations. A tangible improvement

At the other extreme, the effects were not very beneficial. The supermarket cashiers , for example, did not earn extra vacation days but mornings on weekdays, when there are few customers. And what is the use of having free mornings if you have to take the child to school like any other day?

However, Jospin, who had reached the first secretary of the PS for a fright of the party elephants , including Jacques Delors , and prime minister for the miscalculation of the right-wing president, believed that his hour of glory had arrived. After five years of cohabitation with Chirac, he decided to run for the 2002 presidential elections.

The beneficiaries for their 35 hours did not pay him with their votes. Confident, the left presented several candidates ... and the socialist candidate stayed out of the second round, for the first time in decades. Chirac won a second term against the leader of the National Front, Jean Marie Le Pen . Jospin retired from politics.

His minister, Martine Aubry survives. Imposed by the party apparatus, it was made in 2001 with the mayor of Lille, a socialist stronghold for a century. He came to rule the PS in 2008 after a wild duel with Ségolène Royal but the militancy preferred François Hollande in the primary of 2011. At 69, the 35-hour minister has decided to appear for the fourth time for mayor of Lille. He had promised not to. He justifies that he wants to "help the left" and act as a "barrier" against Macron's "liberalism."

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