Rationale
The main stated objectives of the law were twofold:
- To reduce unemployment and yield a better division of labor, in a context where some people work long hours while some others are unemployed. A 10.2% decrease in the hours extracted from each worker would, theoretically, require firms to hire correspondingly more workers, a remedy for unemployment.
- To take advantage of improvements in productivity of modern society to give workers some more personal time to enhance quality of life.
Another reason was that the Jospin administration took advantage of the changes introduced with the 35-hour working week to relax other workforce legislation.
(See working time for further discussion of the health and leisure-related reasons for limited work weeks.)
Read more about this topic: 35-hour Workweek