Nicolas Sarkozy thinks his compatriots do not work hard or long enough. The hyperactive president of France also wants the French to be richer. To that end, he wants to scrap the country’s 35-hour workweek, a holdover from the socialist era, to encourage a stronger work ethic and greater productivity.  The current system, he has complained, discourages work and cannot sustain France’s costly welfare outlays.

But economists point out that while shaking up France’s short workweek might boost the nation’s lagging economy, it will not necessarily spur greater productivity. That is because in terms of labor productivity, at least as measured by the International Labor Organization (ILO), France already ranks near the top. In its biannual report released last December, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development praised the French labor market, describing it as “quite strong.” Productivity is a yardstick of how efficiently a country’s laborers work and what value they add to the economy. Specifically, it is determined by the annual amount of GDP produced per working-age person, whether employed or not.

By this criterion, France boasts the fifth-most-productive workers in the world, according to a September 2007 report by the ILO that compiled data on 20 indicators, including employment-to-population ratios and labor productivity. The most industrious country in the world remains the United States.  American workers on average create nearly $64,000 in value per worker to the economy, but also log far more hours, take fewer vacations and retire later in life than their European counterparts. However, many economists believe that the ILO does not provide a good benchmark of value-added labor productivity or efficiency, because simply comparing averages is misleading. The figure can become skewed in the U.S., for example, because so many people work long hours here; thus more hours of work are calculated into the average than for France. But when one measures productivity as value added per hour worked, Norway tops the list, followed by the United States, with France coming in a respectable third.

Sarkozy wants France to try to catch up with the United States vis-à-vis hours worked. He has proposed encouraging employees to work more hours with the incentive of overtime pay that would not be taxed. With intense competition from abroad for goods, services and skilled labor, French firms complain that they are at a disadvantage because of strict labor laws, and have generally supported Sarkozy’s plans to extend the workweek. But opponents, including France’s powerful labor unions, say the plan will only cut into French workers’ quality of life and generous vacation time.

Working Smarter

Lawrence Jeff Johnson, who heads the ILO’s Employment Trends team and was the lead author of the 2007 study, does not believe longer workweeks will put France at an advantage. While logging longer hours can make workers marginally more productive, it is unsustainable over the long term, and often leads to burnout among workers and more accidents on the job, he says.

The key, Johnson says, is requiring employees not to work longer but to work smarter. Countries with higher rates of productivity tend to invest more heavily in education programs for their laborers as well as in technology. Indeed, their workforces are teeming with what management consultant Peter Drucker called “knowledge workers”—laborers who use their brains more than their hands. Because the United States still attracts workers with strong information-technology skills, its productivity levels continue to soar above the competition.

Of course, the outsourcing of jobs to the developing world remains a real concern among American workers. In effect, offshoring serves to depress wages and is a condition that translates into higher productivity statistics—unless, of course, the country begins to see massive unemployment rates.

To be sure, labor productivity is just one of many financial indicators (tax codes, labor laws, etc.) that foreign investors use to determine a country’s attractiveness, though higher productivity tends to correlate strongly with healthier, more versatile economies. Productive workers provide greater output of better goods and services, which in turn attracts more foreign investment—a virtuous cycle that begins with the work ethic of those at the bottom of labor’s totem pole. “Productivity is not the whole picture,” Johnson admits, “but it is a measurement of how well the marketplace is performing.”

Brooke Partridge, the CEO of Vital Wave Consulting, a California-based market-research company and management consultancy specializing in emerging markets, advises countries to invest heavily in job-retraining programs to narrow the productivity gap. “This provides higher value, which is not only good for the company but good for the economy and good for the person, because they’re providing a higher-level skill,” she says.

Eliminating waste in the workday, providing safe work environments, and establishing stronger bonds between employee and employer are also important, says Anand Sharma of TBM Consulting Group, a coauthor of The Perfect Engine, a 2001 book that examines how management can increase labor efficiency. “It comes down to creating workers, not automatons for their hands and sweat,” he says. “People are the most appreciating asset if you invest in them and create an atmosphere of trust.”

The biggest issue that France faces is not productivity per se, but the fact that the current labor model is unsustainable. However, if Sarkozy’s plan were implemented, the country would add less-productive workers—the very young, the very old, the unskilled. Productivity would be lower then, in terms of output per hour worked, even if, in practice, greater employment is good for the French economy. “It’s clear if you continue to work as a construction worker until 65, you’re unlikely to be as productive as you were at 35,” says Jacob Kierkegaard, a labor expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

“It’s a very nice concept—to capture this idea of how good are we on average at what we do,” Kierkegaard says. “But the problem is that measuring it is extremely difficult to do.” For one, it is company-specific. “After all, you can have an extremely productive company in Italy, even though on average Italian productivity is very bad,” he maintains. Likewise, a few years back in Germany, Siemens told its workers to work longer hours—40 per week rather than 35—for no additional pay or the company would shift their jobs to Eastern Europe. Smaller companies followed suit, resulting in a loosening of German labor markets. Similarly, in France, lean multinationals such as L’Oréal have consistently boosted profitability without sacrificing productivity. These companies, the thinking goes, would grow still more competitive if Sarkozy could extend France’s workweek.

The French president is brave to take on his country’s all-powerful labor unions and to attempt to bid farewell to those cushy workweeks that have become customary. But he might get more bang for his euro not by cutting taxes on overtime work, but by ensuring that French workers can compete with their American and Irish counterparts in terms of education, training and technical skills. Only then can the French be sure that, to paraphrase playwright George Bernard Shaw, the harder they work, the more they will live. 

Lionel Beehner is a freelance writer based in New York.