Pourquoi les 35 heures suscitent-elles tant de polémiques ? Ceux qui sont pour savent bien qu’elles n’ont pas résorbé le chômage. Ceux qui sont contre n’ignorent pas qu’elles ont changé la vie. Pour éclairer le débat, ce livre le met en perspective dans la longue durée historique. Il montre comment la diminution du temps de travail fut à l’origine un problème de santé publique. Comment cette question n’a pas été qu’un mot d’ordre syndical mais aussi une question politique. Comment les autres aspects de la durée du travail ont tour à tour été abordés, celui des congés payés, des congés formation, des congés maladie, du temps partiel... et même de l’augmentation du temps de travail. Keynes pronostiquait qu’en 2030 les hommes ne travailleraient plus que 15 heures par semaine et redoutait qu’en résulte « une dépression nerveuse collective ». La réduction du temps de travail serait-elle associée à l’augmentation de la consommation de psychotropes ? Où la France apparaît comme le laboratoire de l’aménagement du temps de travail. Patrick Fridenson, historien, est directeur d’études à l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Bénédicte Reynaud, économiste, est directrice de recherche au CNRS. P. Askenazy, C. Bloch-London, J. Bourdieu, A. Chatriot, J. Freyssinet, E. Pezet et M. Roger ont contribué à ce volume.

Including international comparative analysis alongside national case studies, this volume offers a wealth of information on the new trends which have emerged over the past decades - all of which were discussed at the recent 9th International Symposium on Working Time, Paris (2004). It looks at the increasing use of results-based employment relationships for managers and professionals, and the increasing fragmentation of time to more closely tailor staffing needs to customer requirements (e.g., short-hours, part-time work). Moreover, as operating/opening hours rapidly expand toward a 24-hour and 7-day economy, the book considers how this has resulted in a growing diversification, decentralization, and individualization of working hours, as well as an increasing tension between enterprises' business requirements and workers' needs and preferences regarding their hours. This new reality has raised some other challenging issues as well and the volume addresses those such as increasing employment insecurity and instability, time-related social inequalities, particularly in relation to gender, workers' ability to balance their paid work with their personal lives, and even the synchronization of working hours with social times, such as community activities.

John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

Labour: A Heterodox Approach provides a theoretical reconstruction of the labour and job market by examining it in a rich historical context. It explores the fundamental implications of the theories of consumption and growth and aims at solving the difficulties raised by the dominant economic theories (neoclassical, Keynesian, supply side) by taking into account the dimension of the historical conflict of the labour market and the public intervention that results from it, such as the construction of a specific legal framework that is to say, labour law. The work focuses on providing a description of conflict and intervention, the market's leading characteristics, and demonstrates that they can be interpreted by introducing two major remedial hypotheses in economic fundamentals. It also contributes to solving several theoretical controversies and highlights the two main perspectives on the economic regulation of the labour market.

Very few authors have addressed the origins of capitalism in France as the emergence of a distinct form of historical society, premised on a new configuration of social power, rather than as an extension of commercial activities liberated from feudal obstacles. Xavier Lafrance offers the first thorough historical analysis of the origins of capitalist social property relations in France from a 'political Marxist' or (Capital-centric Marxist) perspective. Putting emphasis on the role of the state, The Making of Capitalism in France shows how the capitalist system was first imported into this country in an industrial form, and considerably later than is usually assumed. This work demonstrates that the French Revolution was not capitalist, and in fact consolidated customary regulations that formed the bedrock of the formation of the working class.