Working time and labour law, Marine Tondelier
Statutory working time: 32 hours with no loss of pay in arduous or night-work occupations
Direction of change: decrease, compared with current law.
The lever. Weekly working time beyond which hours become overtime. It has been 35 hours since the Aubry laws. Direction rule: ↑ longer statutory working time.
« Franchir une nouvelle étape pour la diminution du temps de travail. Passer aux 32 heures sans perte de salaire dans les métiers pénibles ou de nuit en y conditionnant les aides aux entreprises. »1Translation by the editorsTake a new step in reducing working time. Move to 32 hours with no loss of pay in arduous or night-work occupations, making aid to companies conditional on it.
Encoding
No cost-schedule parameter for this position: see the costing for the reason.
Costing
Announced by the candidate
not announced
The programme does not cost this measure.
Published costings
none
No external costing of this position recorded to date.
Our calculation
lever that cannot be costed
Lever with no coefficient in the cost schedule: the position is compared, not costed.
Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule
Current law. Statutory working time: 35 hours per week (Labour Code, Art. L3121-27), beyond which overtime applies.
Horizon. Not applicable.
Limits. Statically, the statutory working week has no direct cost for public finances. The effects (employment, wages, cost of public hiring at 32 hours, overtime) are behavioural. For the 32-hour week in the civil service or a 6th week of paid leave, no official costing has been read. The 2024 OFCE table cites €1.6bn per year (Montaigne 2022) for the 6th week, a distinct measure. To be treated as a dynamic effect, separately.
- OFCE, Programmes législatives 2024, NFP, 2024: « sixième semaine de congés payés : 30 Md€ / 1,6 Md€ par an (IM 2022) »
How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.
- Pour une prospérité écologique – Le nouveau programme des Écologistes (Projet 2027), version 1 of 25 August 2026, p. 57. Open the document at this page.
Contest this encoding (prefilled email; procedure and deadlines)