Retailleau wants to give you a 13th month in exchange for thirty extra minutes a day

According to Le Figaro, Bruno Retailleau, the Les Républicains candidate in the presidential race, promises "a 13th, even a 14th, month's salary" to French workers who agree to work thirty minutes more a day. The mechanism: effectively put an end to the 35-hour week, and exempt overtime hours from social contributions, for employee and employer alike, from the 36th hour onward. The paper asks whether the promise is "viable". What the report does not tell us is who pays the bill, nor how many employees would actually see these hours offered, and paid, by their employer. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, admire the elegance of the gift wrapping. The "13th month" sounds like a Christmas bonus; in reality it is life time converted into euros, at a rate set by the employer. Thirty minutes a day comes to roughly two and a half hours a week. Add those to the working day and you are not "giving back" purchasing power: you are having the worker buy it, with his or her own time.

Marx, in the chapter of Capital devoted to the working day, had the simple idea of splitting that day in two: the necessary time to produce the equivalent of the wage, and surplus labour beyond it. Take six necessary hours: add an hour and surplus labour rises, without the base wage having moved. Apply this to our case. If the day lengthens by thirty minutes and those minutes are paid a premium, or merely at the normal rate, the question is not "how much more do we earn?" but "what share of this extra time goes to the person who supplies it, and what share to the person who pockets it?" On this point the programme says nothing in the report, and that is precisely where the real issue lies.

The exemption from contributions adds a piquant detail. Contributions are socialised wages: pensions, health care, unemployment cover. Scrapping them on overtime means having the Sécu, the French social security system, finance the gift, and therefore the same workers, later and elsewhere. We pay for the 13th month with the 14th month of our pension. And the employer, also exempted, has every reason to prefer tax-free overtime to hiring one more person. The unemployed, for their part, will never see the colour of the 13th month, but they will be told they lack motivation.

The productivity gains accumulated over decades could have been used to shorten working time; the Republic even enshrined, in 1946, the right to "rest and leisure". Today we are offered the chance to buy them back in thirty-minute instalments. Free time becomes a paid option, and the wage a toll.

The costing remains to be examined, which Le Figaro does and which we cannot judge on the documents. But the right question is not budgetary viability. It is: who owns the hours?