PARIS - Although countries across Western Europe have been convulsed by strikes in recent month, there have been few expressions of solidarity with the French unions that brought parts of their country to a standstill on Tuesday, protesting against a planned increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64.
Commentators have mocked French anger over "what would seem like a gentle reform" anywhere but in France – a delusional "island of the blessed" where full-time employees get at least five weeks of vacation a year.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, meanwhile, suggested "laziness" was driving the opposition against the government plans.
It may be hard for outsiders to muster sympathy for French workers, with their 35-hour weeks, their generous lunch breaks and vacation time, and their "right to disconnect" from job-related communication outside of working hours.
But in France, protesters feel misunderstood by critics. Far from laziness, they say, their furious response to President Emmanuel Macron's plan is at least partly rooted in a sentiment that the French are already working hard – too hard, in fact.
"Many unions agree that before considering a pension reform, one must first talk about work itself," said Bruno Palier, a research director at Sciences Po Paris who focuses on European welfare models.
"When the French work, they work very, very hard," he said.
Measured by output per hour worked, French employees were more productive than their German counterparts, who are often perceived to be obsessed with efficiency, and French workers were only slightly less productive than Americans in 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
France also has some of the highest levels of burnout and work accidents among European workers, which researchers have attributed to an, at times, toxic and hierarchical work culture that limits employees' growth and engagement. After accounting for the differences in price levels, Americans earn about 17% more than French employees, OECD data shows.
Critics of Macron's retirement plans have put forward a wide range of arguments against the increase to 64 years by 2030, including that blue-collar workers – who on average die earlier than richer people or their white-collar counterparts – will be hit hardest. But frustration with what many here perceive as deteriorating working conditions, Palier said, "is key to understanding the resistance", too.
After weeks of protests, French unions expected nothing less than a "social tsunami" on Tuesday. Trains operated by France's state-owned railway company were strongly disrupted, metro lines closed, and more than 60% of primary schoolteachers were estimated to participate in the strikes, according to early union figures. The perhaps biggest question is whether Tuesday's strikes will continue through much of the week, or whether protesters will go back to work.
The majority of the country's liquefied natural gas terminals will be closed for seven days, union officials announced on Monday, and refinery strikes could curtail the supply of gasoline.
While some French rushed to gas stations on Monday to prepare for disruptions, most approve of the strikes, surveys show.
Macron, who lost his absolute majority in Parliament last year, has weighed his words carefully, but he still enraged left-wing critics when he said he hasn't been able to "spot public anger" over his plans.
He has maintained that a higher retirement age would reflect rising life expectancy in the country, which has increased by around three years over the past two decades. Many of France's neighbours have higher retirement ages, even though the complexity of Europe's pension systems makes them difficult to compare.
In an interview last month, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne signalled that there may be some room for compromise on many employees' underlying frustrations with working conditions. Acknowledging that the French "are not happy at work", she promised to address the dissatisfaction. But Borne and others are drawing the wrong conclusions on how to go about it, left-wing critics say.
In late January, Gabriel Attal, the ambitious budget minister, announced that he would test a four-day work week in a trial run. Rather than cutting working hours, however, Attal merely envisioned spreading the 35 hours over four instead of five days. This would be only slightly longer than an average workday in the US, but the idea prompted a swift backlash in France. Rather than putting more pressure on employees, the government should strive to reduce the burden on them, the government's critics say.
Philippe Askenazy, a French economist, was among a team of US- and France-based researchers that about a decade ago set out to examine the differences in working conditions of cashiers in American and French supermarkets. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that French cashiers had higher targets for the scanning of items and added more value per hour than their American counterparts.
Askenazy attributes the high workload in France to the adoption of the 35-hour work week in 2000, which was meant to boost job growth but has in some ways created a paradoxical work environment.
Among many other rules that are supposed to draw a sharp line between working hours and leisure time, French labour law still bans workers from eating lunch at their desks. But at the same time, companies have embraced "high-performance workplace practices and increased the monitoring of workers," Askenazy said.
Since the introduction of France's 35-hour work week, the French have become less enthusiastic about the importance of their jobs and less proud of their companies, according to the left-wing Jean-Jaurès Foundation. Fewer people are interested in management positions, and some have surreptitiously disconnected from work – akin to the quiet-quitting trend elsewhere.
For political scientist Palier, the most striking signs of the toxic work culture that has emerged in France are the clusters of work-linked suicides. In a landmark case last year, an appeals court convicted the former CEO of France's biggest telecommunications company of "institutional moral harassment" after 19 workers died by suicide.
Whoever wants to make the French appreciate work again, Palier said, will first need to confront the toxic aspects and failures "of the relationship with work in France, with management, and the way we've tried to construct a strategy of competitiveness".
The Washington Post