Roger Cohen’s column in today’s Times is, to me, a puzzler. The column is a paean of praise to the new French government’s efforts to get the French to spend more of their lives working. Cohen is evidently smitten with the “tall and striking” finance minister, Christine Lagarde. He quotes her with apparent approval:
In an interview, Lagarde says that more than two decades at a U.S. corporation taught her: “The more hours you worked, the more hours you billed, the more profit you could generate for yourself and your firm. That was the mantra.”
The equivalent mantra in the French bureaucracy might be: the fewer hours you work, the more vacation you take, the more time you have to grumble about the state of the universe and the smarter you feel, especially compared to workaholic dingbats across the Atlantic with no time for boules.
Lagarde tells Cohen that when she got back from her American sojourn she found that the French had “internalized” their thirty-five-hour week and that this “had produced disastrous effects.”
What effects? “People did not really talk about their work. They talked about their long weekends.”
That’s it, disaster-wise. Quelle horreur.
Could it be that French people talk about their long weekends because they have long weekends? Because they choose to reward themselves not with higher wages or lower taxes but with great, luxurious stretches of time during which they can do exactly what they wish to do, rather than what their employers wish them to do?
Time is money, goes the old Anglo-Saxon saying. But time, not money—hours and days, not dollars and francs—is the stuff of which life is made. I’m having a hard time understanding why the French are fools for choosing to take some marginal compensation in the form of extra time (what Cohen calls “hours of idleness”) rather than extra money. But, then, my job, like Cohen’s, is to “grumble about the state of the universe.” Not everyone is so lucky.
P.S. Elsewhere on the Times Op-Ed page, Gail Collins has some valuable things to say about another puzzler: why American working parents, who are notably short on Cohen’s “hours of idleness,” do not have reliable, affordable access to high-quality child care.
No points for guessing which country’s working mamans et papas do have such access.