Back in 2002, The French voted out their Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin who had been elected in 1997 offering grand visions of reforming society. In the immediate election post-mortem the press at least gave him credit for the success of his enlightened principal driven policy reforms.
“Under his tenure, the country has seen a sustained period of growth and a big fall in unemployment, thanks in part to his audacious introduction of a 35-hour working week and measures to boost youth employment.”In 2001, at the height of Lionel Jospin’s leadership, he gave a speech On the Future of an Enlarged Europe which outlined his socialist vision for the region.
Europe must help devise the regulation which the world needs. To prevent private-sector interests from stifling the general interest, to prevent short-term profit-seeking from ignoring social justice and damaging the environment, "rules of the game" must be defined.How ironic that less than three years later, France dismantles its 35 hour work week as the socialist policy experiment proves a disastrous failure. It seems that intention did not quite match up with effect in the dynamic complexity of the real world.
The only development is sustainable development. The planet is under threat. We are accountable to future generations. Europe, historically an industrial heartland, a region having a high population density and poorly endowed with raw materials, has learned from the two oil shocks that the Earth is not an inexhaustible inventory of natural resources, …Europe, which spearheads the creation of a world environment authority as proposed by my government, should have an ambitious policy aimed at devising and promoting technologies which respect the environment.”
“But with unemployment at 10 percent, politicians of all stripes acknowledge that the country's unique 35-hour law has failed in its original ambition: to force employers to hire massively. What's more, there are strong signs that it hurt living standards as employers froze salaries to make up for lost labor.” “The intention was to spread work around, but the effect was to spread our salaries around,” Thierry Breton, France's new finance minister, said last week.”Something must of gotten calculated wrong in the policy equations. People study history because you can not study the future, and history teaches that all efforts are trial and error. When the experiment involves imposing universal mandatory changes on society, the consequences can be unforeseen, unintended and tragic. I hope this is something the COWS in the Madison neighborhood fully appreciate.
