Amidst evidence that even the French people are revolting against the EU "constitution," they are also recognizing that their naive attempt to repeal the laws of economics has utterly failed.

The French social-ists should have gone to a 4 day workweek and allowed much more overtime at time and a half. The employers might have in turn lowered vacation time some, but a 4 day workweek would have been more permanent.

"Social-ists" w/o the hyphen in these comments. LOL

The French social-ists should have gone to a 4 day workweek and allowed much more overtime at time and a half. The employers might have in turn lowered vacation time some, but a 4 day workweek would have been more permanent.

"Social-ists" w/o the hyphen is censored in these comments. LOL

I've always thought that the way to slow out of control government growth would be a shorter work week. Many people can get by with less money, and given the sliding tax scales, it becomes advantageous for everyone but the government, which gets an even greater reduction in revenue. Which might be why ultra welfare state France,which needs tax money the way a vampire needs blood, has gone back to a 39 hour week.

Can't spell soci@lists without the ci@lis...

I'm just glad that vi@gr@ isn't a substring of any other words (at least any that I've found so far).

Everybody's trying to repeal various laws of human nature.

The article makes the interesting point that the French are among the most productive people on the planet. Per hour statistics indicate they are almost 8% more productive than Americans.

While I certainly don't favor the governmental controls enacted by the French, I also don't think much of the "work more, more, more" mantra that grips so many in this country. Bad ideas fail whether you work on them 40 hours/week or 80 hours/week. The Stakhanovite movement took place in Stalinist Russia. It didn't keep the Soviet system from failing.

I suspect both France and the United States would both be better places if people in both countries tried learning more from each other.

> Per hour statistics indicate they are almost 8% more productive than Americans.

They're currently behind on a per-employee basis. As productivity per hour varies with the number of hours worked, productivity per hour doesn't tell us that they'll catch up if they start working more hours.

Andy,

You'rre right about the per employee productivity. That, though, is explainable by the really limited number of hours they work.

There is some pretty decent research that indicates productivity per employee tops out around 40 hours/week. This could be especially true of work where some sort of intellectual activity is required. First your ability to think independently goes. Then your ability to think decently. The last thing to go is your body. It's probably due to the needs we had when we evolved. For most humans until very recently a strong body was more important than a strong mind.

Like I said before, I think both France and the United States have much to learn from each other. One of the things that really interests me about France is the fact that it's still recovering from two really devastating wars. In some ways it's a worst case scenario. I don't know if you've ever been there, but I think as a worst case scenario it's not all that bad.