French leave, redefined

The French are considered trendsetters in fashion, design, and so on. But in some areas, even if they can’t set a trend, you must concede that they are at least mavericks. Take the work-week. In 2000, the French passed a law reducing the legal hours worked per week from 39 to 35 hours.

The objective was to get more people hired (it was a socialist government), and to give people more personal time. With the rest of the world working overtime, this was radical!

The political right broke out in rashes over the law, and argued that the very restrictive policies in France that stand in the way of lay-offs are what prevented more hiring.

The reduced work-week idea didn’t catch on anywhere else in the world. Even in France, the law seems to be more rigidly followed in the case of blue-collar workers, while the white-collar employee continues to slog it out, sometimes paid overtime and often just to see a smile on the boss’ face.

Now, the latest French salvo is what I would like to call ‘leave your work at the workplace’ rule. In an agreement signed among over 1,200 major engineering and consulting firms and their unions, employees are going to have a minimum of 11-hour rest every day.

The requirement of a break from work is an obligation and means that you are disconnected from your communication tools.

In plain English, as you pack up your bag to leave for home at the end of the day, you can leave your smartphones, iPads, laptops, and so on, behind.

Of course, you may still want to carry it around for all your personal uses. The objective, according to one of the unions, is to guarantee a right to health and provide for rest.

For those who are addicted to these communication devices, I assume that the unions will now start ‘Workhorse Anonymous’ groups to help ease the withdrawal syndrome. The unions may also have factored in the passive workhorse effects into this. Imagine the peace you can now experience on flights or during train rides within France when you do not have to overhear your co-passenger argue with his colleague about product pricing, and delivery schedules and what he or she said at the last meeting and how that other manager is so obnoxious, and so on!

The Americans must be having a big laugh about all this. They already snigger when talking about French work habits (at least, those who are not aware that French worker productivity in spite of such rules is actually slightly higher than the American).

The whole country is on vacation during August, they guffaw. Books in America that complain about too much work with titles like The overworked American and The white-collar sweatshop have sold well but not made much of an impact in the local workplace.

Globalisation can take as much of the blame as technology for our need to be continuously connected to work.

As people work across time zones, meetings take place at all odd hours. (A popular pastime for a two-year old I know whose father is a software exec is to bang a door shut while yelling ‘conference call!’ You can guess where she gets it from.)

Since all work is digitised, and files are in a cloud, we carry the work everywhere and are able to respond meaningfully to work-related queries anytime, anywhere.

We don’t stop to think whether we really have to, or if a response can wait. Work begins to creep into our personal time — whether we are at a family dinner or in line at the store.

For some, it is a feeling of importance that they are needed all the time and the whole office will stop if they do not take the call or reply to the e-mail. Thus, let us compliment the French for making us stop to think: Is work, and our role in it, really that important?

The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal Global Business School, Sonipat, Delhi NCR.

COMMENT NOW