Le risque des 35 heures

The Risk of the 35 Hours
Enacted as it is at the national level, there is little chance that the reduction in work time to 35 hours per week will be applied effectively everywhere. For its effectiveness depends on an exploration of how to do it within each enterprise. And the risk is great that the RWT will be converted into a bidding war for jobs, thereby entrenching a lack of competitiveness in business that will be impossible to compensate by “monetary manipulation”.
Looking at it from the aggregate perspective, macro-economic simulations have no predictive power. At best. they describe the gap-filling that is required to assure success for the reduced work-week policy. They tell us nothing about whether these conditions are likely to be realized.