And the Communists want Mr Prodi to emulate the French and enact a 35-hour working week.
ECONOMIST: Italy��s government soldiers on, but for how long?
That would mean the current 35-hour working week remaining, as well as the amount of class contact time, set at 855 hours.
But the French also strongly believe that the state should ensure high wages for truckers, jobs for everyone and a 35-hour working week to boot.
ECONOMIST: Britain is not the only awkward partner in Europe
But the opt-out that we have now means you can only work longer hours if you choose to opt out of the 48-hour working week.
In March 1995 the authorities announced a five-day, 40-hour working week.
Workers in heavy industry, the core of Mr Bertinotti's support, might get a 35-hour working week and be exempted from the tougher rules on early retirement.
Hospital workers also took action on Monday over their complaint that not enough extra staff have been hired to cope with France's 35-hour working week legislation.
In France, the introduction of a 35-hour working week means that more workers are needed to produce the same economic output, which is aggravating labour shortages.
They see her views, such as her calls for a shake-up to the education system and the 35-hour working week, as a betrayal of the Socialist Party's leftist credentials.
Yet she also said that she never believed in a big rise in the minimum wage, nor in widening the application of the 35-hour working week, though both were centrepieces of her campaign.
It is even more unusual that the leader should be Sarkozy, especially as he came to power on a platform of rupture with the French comforts of old: the 35-hour working week, toasty public-sector employment benefits and a generally negative attitude towards workaholism.
France has a 35-hour statutory working week, brought in by the Socialist Party in 2000, but critics say it is now stifling economic growth.
There, the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin has been busy imposing new costs on employers with one hand (through such policies as a shorter, 35-hour, working week) while trying to reduce them with the other for example, by its plans announced last week for further cuts in social-security contributions paid by employers who create at least 6% more jobs but also enforce the 35-hour week.
The UK's opt-out from the Working Time Directive only applies to the directive's clause setting a 48-hour limit on the working week.
The idea might seem radical, but in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes envisaged we'd be working a 15-hour week by the beginning of the 21st Century, believing that would be enough to suit our material needs.
You might be the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with working 16 hour days, seven days a week.
Small businesses, especially, will welcome such efforts to cut the often prohibitive cost of hiring extra workers particularly in the face of the working week's coming 35-hour limit.
San Francisco-based Bechtel got the green light early on from Uncle Sam ( see box, p. 65), and it has 100 senior managers in Iraq working 14-hour days, seven days a week.
Add to this mix the change in the world of work, where, instead of a 40 hour work week in the USA and a more rational 32-35 hour work week in the much of the EU, the dot.com techies are working 60-80 hours a week, with little or no time scheduled for physical recreation or broader social, cultural, or political activities or involvement.
By contrast, the working week of part-timers has risen by about half an hour over the same period.
The Trades Union Congress says Britain's policy of allowing companies to opt-out of the European Union Working Time Directive, meaning people to work over the 48-hour a week limit on a "voluntary" basis, meant the protection it offered could be circumvented.
"The retirement age is also being raised by a year and companies are to be allowed to negotiate working time directly with employee representatives to permit more than a 35-hour week, " says Delfeld.
John MacDougall, an anthropology researcher working in Lombok, witnessed the torching of six churches in an hour and a half last week.
These workers would be more free if they could work 40 hours a week at any time intervals they felt like, e.g. working ten hour days Saturday through Tuesday.
Also during that pay period, one guard was listed on the staffing report as working two separate 36-hour shifts, and a total of nearly 140 hours in a two-week span.
FORBES: AP Report Shows Idaho Corrections Officers Working 48-Hour Shifts
These unfortunate victims of comparative-advantage madness will never taste the career glories known by the 19-year-old Shenzhen employee of Apple supplier FoxConn who was blessed with the good fortune of working seven nights a week, for 11 hours at a stretch, for about a buck an hour, before he threw himself out a window.
应用推荐