French Prime Minister Attal yesterday announced the promotion of a four-day workweek experiment to shorten working hours and achieve three days of rest per week. In his overall policy speech at the National Assembly, Atal called on all departments to try it out, emphasizing that this is not a four-day workweek, but a compression of five days of work to four days to strive for a longer weekly break.
In other words, the Prime Minister proposed concentrating working hours into four days in exchange for three days of rest while keeping the weekly working hours unchanged. He expected France to be a role model in terms of labor conditions.
The National Assembly also launched the “4-day workweek task” and invited business owners, union members, and labor and sociology experts to hold public hearings to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the four-day workweek and the possibility of changing the labor model.
The concept stems from an experiment promoted by Attal last year when the joint social security and family allowance collection agency of the Picardie region in northern France experimented with a four-day working week. However, the results were not ideal.
According to reports, there were not many participants and poor feedback, possibly because the daily working hours were too long, requiring 36 hours of work to be completed in only four days. Some employees pointed out that it is difficult to cope with the nine-hour working hours a day in terms of family needs and commuting time.
Despite this, surveys show that French people seem to be more supportive of a four-day workweek. According to a 2023 poll, 75% of respondents support it, as long as wages are not lowered.
Although some people point out that a four-day workweek will make work more intensive and difficult to coordinate with family needs, some cities, such as Lyon and Strasbourg, are trialing this new model in the public service sector.
It is worth mentioning that in the British experiment of the “4-day work system”, participants not only worked 4 days a week with the same salary, but also did not increase the number of working hours per day, and it was successful. Companies have expressed support, work performance has not been affected, and absenteeism has dropped. These examples provide interesting references and merit close attention to the development of the French experiment.
