Unions make joint declaration on managers' working time

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In April 1999, the organisations for managerial and professional staff affiliated to France's four general trade union confederations - though not CFE-CGC, the confederation which specifically represents such staff - issued a joint statement on the reduction of managers' and professionals' working time. The aim was to influence the development of the second law on the 35-hour working week, due in late 1999.

On 12 April 1999, the four organisations for managerial and professional staff (cadres) affiliated to France's four general trade union confederations - CFDT, CFTC, CGT and CGT-FO- made public a joint statement on the reduction of the working time of managerial and professional staff. The aim was to influence the development process of the second law on the 35-hour working week, which is scheduled to be passed in late 1999 (FR9904173F) and which should contain specific regulations on the working time of this group of employees. CFE-CGC, the union confederation which specifically represents managerial and professional staff, was not a party to the joint statement, which was the first such initiative since the creation of the four cadresorganisations within the general confederations - UCC-CFDT, UCI-FO, Ugica-CFTC and Ugict-CGT.

In the opinion of the four organisations concerned, "the sectoral employers' associations and many individual employers are attempting, to as great a degree as possible, to maintain the status quo by not including the issue [of the working time of managerial and professional staff] in agreements [on the reduction of working time] or by increasing the number of ill-defined, flat-rate solutions, of which some contain no reference point in terms of hours, some are solely expressed in terms of days worked and others exclude too many managerial and professional staff from the scope of provisions on the calculation and reduction of working time".

The statement by the four organisations is directly aimed at law-makers, and demands that a reference point in terms of hours be maintained for the working time of managerial and professional staff. It places special emphasis on two main points:

1. the idea which has been mooted of including in the Labour Code a definition of three categories of managerial and professional staff (senior executives, staff whose working week is difficult to monitor and production managers falling covered by collective working time provisions) is rejected out of hand by the four organisations. "The signatory unions demand that the proposal for the second law take account of the specific situation of managerial and professional staff without creating artificial segmentation within this group"; and

2. the calculation of managers' and professionals' work in days is not completely rejected, but the unions would like to see it strictly supervised. They state that "all working time can be identified and only the ways of doing this vary. Everyone's employment must comply with regulations set out in the law and in collective agreements (statutory working time, maximum daily and weekly working hours ...)." The aim is to protect the employees and their private lives, and work must "also allow everyone, while carrying a reasonable work load, to remain in good health and maintain balance in their personal lives."

The four organisations are also demanding that the second law set "the required statutory limits, while at the same time leaving the task of defining the appropriate types of reduction of working time and workloads, including precise hourly figures, to negotiations". The fact that the unions are referring to these maximum limits implies that working time should continue to be calculated in hours, even though in reality the reduction of working time could, through company-level bargaining, be expressed in days.