Working-time regulations in France: the shift from law to collective bargaining and inter-individual negotiations: From governing by legal rules to governance by standards and instruments? Towards “soft” power?

International audienceFor a century and a half (1830-1980), working time in France has been constructed as a collective norm, a measure of stability around what might be called a standard by an anchoring of rules in labour law, and the creation of special inspectors charged with overseeing the implementation of these regulations in business. The four main components of the working time standard temporal order are: a standard or social norm (covering weekly and daily rest times and holiday entitlements), state intervention as a normative power, the common rule creates collective recipients, highly developed sanctions. The 1980s saw a revision of this conception of time and was characterized by the abandonment of the traditional scheme of collective bargaining around the limitation of working hours, which was abandoned by unions, employers and by public policies in favour of the logic of production and their extensions through various methods of temporal flexibility. The mid of the 1990 added a more individualized approach by a state driven initiative to implement times saving accounts in companies. These new instruments lead to “face to face” negotiations between various actors and set new standards in the way of dealing with working time. What is the content of this new direction? Is state power being replaced by local and individual negotiations? What are the foundations and the aims of these new arrangements