You're onto something there. The hubbub is all due to a kind of hobby of English-speaking media (=their wealthy owners?) to whack France & its world leadership in lowering the nationwide definition of "full time" amid proliferating worksaving technology - God forbid we should switch from the standard layoff response thus disempowering employees & weakening wages and markets, to trimming hours across the board and maintaining employment and wages and markets = no more complaints about "slow growth" = upsizing despite constant downsizing. As for "ineffective," in 1997 the 35 hours was voted in because official unemployment (UE) reached 12.6%. After the workweek went from 39 to 35 in the next four years, UE was down to 8.6% in 2001 before the US-led recession hit France. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% UE cut. Isn't that what the USA got 1938-40? 44hr workweek in 1938, UE 19.0%; 42hrs in 1939, UE 17.2%; 40hrs in 1940, UE 14.6%. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% unemployment cut again. See Roediger & Foner's history of the US workweek, Our Own Time. The objection to workweek reduction is that it's effective, so it must be slandered energetically - those who talk most about freedom are most scared of it, and financially secure free time is the most basic freedom, without which the other freedoms are either inaccessible or meaningless. Deets on timesizingdotcom.