How will France pay the bill for the extraordinary coronavirus crisis? In a note entitled " Bouncing back from Covid-19: the challenge of working time ", the Montaigne Institute puts its feet in the dish. The liberal think tank, under the pen of the economist Bertrand Martinot, made nine proposals to revive the economy by pressing the - sensitive - rope of working time.
The liberal think tank does not call for a general return to the 39 hours but proposes adjustments to increase working hours, little by little. He proposed in particular to delete Thursday from the Ascension as a public holiday. " If France is in an average situation compared to its European partners for the number of public holidays, it is characterized by a particularly high number of days during the month of May (three or four public holidays depending on the year, including the Thursday of the Ascension which leads each year to a "bridge") ", we note in the note.
Similarly, the Institute suggests that " any training included in the company's skills development plan could be carried out outside the employee's working time with the latter's agreement ", provided that the training in question is not required.
These measures should not only allow companies to give a sudden boost to their activity, argues economist Bertrand Martinot: " we will live for many months with the virus, so in a very specific health environment that will make lose a lot of hourly productivity to businesses ”. A loss that the increase in the number of hours worked should compensate.
Efforts required from public services
The economist also calls on the public service to contribute by reducing by " ten " the number of RTT in the public service, " on a provisional basis " and without compulsory salary compensation. According to him, the crisis is an opportunity to carry out " a new examination of the organization of working time in the public service, which has already been the subject of numerous reports ". The economist wants to put the public administration on a diet, by laying flat, " in the medium term ", the question of the duration and the organization of working time in his organizations.
Finally, the Montaigne Institute calls for eliminating the first All Saints' holiday week of autumn 2020 for students, in order to allow them to "make up for the weeks of schooling partially lost during spring and summer 2020 ". " It would be to draw inspiration from Singapore's reaction to the SARS crisis in 2003, a country which has cut 15 days of school vacation in June to make up for the backlog of schooling ," he argues.
Very political measures
The proposals made by the Montaigne Institute are reminiscent of the words of the President of Medef. " It will be necessary to ask the question sooner or later of working time, public holidays and paid vacation to accompany the recovery and facilitate, by working a little more, the creation of additional growth ", had thus estimated Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux in our columns, April 10. These words had strongly reacted to the unions. The secretary general of the CFDT, Laurent Berger, for example, got carried away: “ it's totally indecent. Today, workers are paying the cost of this crisis. It is not up to them to pay next ”.
Read also: Agnès Pannier-Runacher: "The strongest companies must give themselves the means to take back"
Contacted by us, the Ministry of Labor has not reacted to the think tank's note for the time being. In government, the very sensitive subject of working time has only been publicly raised by the Secretary of State for the Economy, Agnès Pannier-Runacher. “We will probably have to work more than we have done before . We will have to work hard to create collective wealth , "she said in mid-April, in line with the recommendations of Medef and the Montaigne Institute.
