The Reduction in theWorking Week from 1997 to 2003: The Construction of the Aubry Acts and Preliminary Evaluations

Abstract

The Aubry acts combine a sharp legislative reduction in the legal working week with a sector and corporate bargaining incentive based on a two-step mechanism. In June 1998, the first act set a new legal working week norm and introduced an incentive scheme to provide assistance to firms that made the transition before some deadlines and created or kept jobs. It is not easy to make a short-run evaluation of the Aubry acts. They appear to have had a certain amount of short-run employment success with the creation of some 350,000 jobs. For employers, the introduction of the shorter working week provided an opportunity to introduce or increase flexibility. This moreover had an effect on some of the employees working conditions. Both the quantitative and qualitative studies tend to find an increase in labour inequalities among employees: between socio-economic groups, status and age brackets, and between firms and sectors.Working Time Reduction, Collective Bargaining, Working Time Flexibility, Aubry Laws Development, Aubry Laws Results