EMPLOYMENT: Does the disappearance of Friday reflect the lack of motivation of employees? On the last day of the week, company offices are increasingly empty. And despite teleworking, absenteeism is increasing and has real consequences on the economy.
The four-day week acclaimed by 77% of French people! The result is more surprising than it seems, because the Odoxa investigators took care to specify, in this BFM Business-Agipi survey, that it would be done “without reducing your weekly working hours”. Rest assured, dear reader, you are still in an economic magazine and, even if our investigation into the disappearance of Friday ends with Anne-Marie Rocco taking a walk between gardening and yoga, “freed from the race against time which rhythm of our days”, it also contains a chilling warning from Patrick Artus.
“Laziness epidemic”
The economist is kind enough not to highlight the 3 points of annual productivity gained by a sputtering American economy when Europe, at best, is stagnating. As his colleague Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, puts it bluntly, back on this side of the Atlantic after fifty years spent between Washington and Boston, “the United States is the centre of innovation when Europe is the centre of regulation”… But when he points to France, Artus hurts: “Productivity per capita, that is to say the wealth created by each employee, is now 6 points lower to that measured in 2019. » Main cause? Absenteeism, increased from 4.5 to 6.2%, or 24.5 days of absence in 2022 in the private sector, particularly among those under 35, where it has doubled!
In its new review Mermoz, the Circle of Economists writes, from the pen of Jean-Olivier Hairault, that “ the health crisis has clearly amplified the awareness that work is not everything”. But immediately note this contradiction: “It has not led the vast majority of employees to choose a decrease in their income”.
Mermoz is obviously right to emphasize that teleworking, by recovering transport hours for more leisure, marks “the beginning of a societal reorganization”. But a review of economists should also have looked at the phenomenon of explosions in work stoppages mentioned by Patrick Artus (+ 37.5% in ten years), which has also pushed Health Insurance to increase controls.
The Jean-Jaurès Foundation, which is not, however, a Medef pharmacy , had also raised a cry of alarm in its 2022 note, titled with a timely sense of provocation “Serious fatigue and epidemic of laziness: when some of the French put their thumbs up.” Accompanied by an Ifop survey, it found that 37% of French people recognized themselves as “less motivated than before at work”. In the land of RTT, it is however vital that “Free Friday” does not result in a further deterioration in productivity.
