UNEMPLOYMENT is set to reach unprecedented highs as we prepare for a challenging autumn and winter for workers and businesses. But there could be lessons that coronavirus-stricken economies in 2020 could learn from late 1990s France. To fight against unemployment, France passed ground-breaking laws 20 years ago, stating that a full-time job would be 35 hours instead of 39 per week.

“If politics means anything, now’s the time to prove it.” When Martine Aubry, the French labour secretary, presented the draft bill to lower the legal working week from 39 to 35 hours in 1998, she knew she was about to make history. The socialists, along with the greens and the communists, had won the 1997 snap parliamentary elections on a promise to fight against record levels of unemployment with radical measures: youth and public sector jobs, and a shorter working week without loss of wage.

Twenty years after the two Aubry laws were passed, most French people remain in favour of shorter working weeks. According to leading philosopher and sociologist Dominique Meda, who is publishing Le Manifeste Travail, Démocratiser, Démarchandiser, Dépolluer (The Work Manifesto: Democratise, Demarket, Depollute) next month, “people took this opportunity to spend more time with their children, rest, do DIY and gardening, cook, see friends, or rearrange their grocery shopping”.

Nevertheless, les 35 heures are still a controversial measure to this day, and the debate never seems to stop. “From the start, there have been extremely violent reactions,” Meda explains. “Employers are mostly opposed to it, and the idea conveys the clichés of people who don’t like working anymore, people who are lazy … We’re told time and time again that the French work less than others, and that is supposed to explain our economic and social situation.”

Two decades later, not much has changed. This year’s Citizens’ Assembly on Climate is the most recent proof: a proposal to lower working weeks to 28 hours was put forward before being swiftly binned, with a majority of delegates fearing it might jeopardise the credibility of the assembly’s work.

However, in Germany, the powerful IG Metall union has called for shorter work weeks to save jobs. In the UK, the think tank Autonomy is calling for a four-day working week in the public sector to create half a million jobs. And in France, the CGT (Confédération Générale du travail, General Confederation of Labour in English), the country’s biggest trade union in terms of membership, renewed its campaign four years ago to reduce the working week to 32 hours.

“Travailler moins pour travailler tous” – work less to all work – is what they think should be achieved, according to the CGT’s second most senior representative, confederation general secretary Nathalie Verdeil. “We are relaunching our 32-hours campaign in the context of rising unemployment, as up to one million jobs could disappear in France by the end of the year. The situation for young people is especially difficult. The 32 hours could help us fight against precarity, promote wellbeing, gender equality, and a better work-life balance,” she argues.

Unions and some on the left argue that reducing the amount of time we work makes economic sense, but some say the picture is more complex. The 35-hour working week created 350,000 new jobs, according to the most recent estimates. But Nicolas Bouzou, an economist and author of several books – including his latest one, L’amour Augmenté – argues that reducing working weeks does not automatically create jobs. “It’d be amazing if it were so easy: we’d all be working less and creating more jobs,” he says. “As research shows, the 35 hours only marginally created jobs, but a lot of those were created at the time they were implemented. Economic growth was very strong, and the government subsidised businesses to ease their way into the 35 hours: that’s what created jobs.”

However, he agrees that in times of crisis, reducing working times makes economic sense, as long as it is temporary. “When a sector experiences a brutal and punctual fall in activity, then it’s a good idea to consider reducing working times to prevent redundancies. This is exactly what the hospitality sector is seeing, and this is exactly what Germany did in some sectors.”

Bouzou also believes that the conversation about reducing hours might be outdated, as more workers are in occupations where precise hours are not counted as they used to be in factories, for example. “This is what is already happening. French workers actually don’t work 35 hours per week, even if it is the legal working week: they work more than that, 39 hours on average. There are already laws, including one passed by François Hollande’s socialist government, that make it possible to be outside the 35-hour framework,” the economist says. “Executives and managers have 35-hour contracts, but they don’t count their hours because it’s impossible. They count the number of days they work. We live in societies where it is increasingly harder to count the hours we work. That’s why the notions of 28 or 35 hours doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore. Our society is sufficiently adult to allow for unions and businesses to work together and modulate working time.”

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing individuals to reassess what matters in their lives. As millions of people caught the disease and thousands died, as we are asked to consent to further restrictions to limit the spread of the virus, our wellbeing, and that of our family and friends, is what we worry most about.

The debate around how much time we spend working really is about that. “Working less is not only a social debate, but also a conversation we need to have as a society,” Verdeil believes. “Not working doesn’t mean being inactive: a lot of people who are unemployed or retired are involved in organisations and charities. Reducing working times is a real gesture of emancipation as it allows access to culture, leisure and frees up time to be active citizens … It liberates workers from the relentless rhythm of life, especially in big cities where people wake up early, spend hours commuting, and get back home late. It makes family life much more difficult.”

That is why one of the biggest arguments for reducing working weeks is to give parents, especially fathers, an opportunity to spend more time with their children. “When reduced work weeks were done well and took into account what people wanted, time with children was the first activity people spent their newly found time on, especially those who had young children, and in particular young fathers. At the time, we hoped it would help further gender equality,” says Meda, who was conducting comprehensive research at the Work Ministry in 1998.

Bouzou agrees: “It is important that employees are given the opportunity to work less. It is particularly interesting for men. Scandinavian countries have been great at targeting men with part-time work. It helped to better balance chores between men and women.”

There is more to the debate than simply having more time off, because work impacts many issues. It has been argued that working less would lead to less commuting, which would be better for the planet.

Others think humanity is on its way to stop working altogether. “This idea is gaining momentum, but not always for the right reasons,” says Meda. “I don’t believe automation will put an end to work.

“We can’t know for sure what we’ll end up with in terms of work time per person, but two things are essential. First, we need to reduce working time collectively, as we did with the 35-hours week, and not individually, because one thing is for sure: women will end up with more precarity. Then, we need to share the volume of work available on the entirety of the working age population.”