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Time Saving Account,Capitalization To Improve The Work Life Balance?
The time saving account: capitalization to improve the work life balance?
The time saving account was introduced in 1994 in France. At first underutilised, this mechanism allowing the employees to accumulate extra working time on an individual “time account” to be utilised later, became the nodal point of the time-reduction national policy bringing legal working time from 39h to 35h a week in 1998 and 2000. While time reduction was relentlessly pointed as a central cause of French companies loss of competitiveness in regards to international competition, it remained untouched. National Policies focused on giving more flexibility for the companies to respond to the market fluctuations.
After presenting the principles and evolutions of the TSA in the last 20 years in France, this paper aims at presenting the result of a study conducted through in-depth interviews with companies’ management, unions and employees of large and medium private and public entities. It focuses on the current use of TSA and on the opportunities to “save” time in order to improve the personal work-life balance.
We will show the close link between economic issues related to the company, the collective bargaining and the individual use of TSA. The fundamental questions rising form this study: is time to be saved as money over the whole working life? How the personal effort should be compensated and accompanied by security and redistribution mechanisms? What means working time capitalization for the every day life?