Time-Saving Accounts in France and Germany a Quantitative Analysis of Company Agreements

The capitalisation of working time aims at saving, valuing and sometimes exchanging of accumulated time related to professional activity. This process, which concerns a large number of employees in France and Germany, raises a number of questions. According to which rules the savings are constituted and spent by the employees. Does corporate collective bargaining guide these practices? What are the consequences on work, on employment, on health and on the articulation of social times? Can temporal autonomy of employees be reinforced by the capitalisation of working time?

To answer these questions, we will present the results of a Franco-German research project on collective bargaining of time-saving accounts. Our research is linked to the theory of social regulation (Reynaud) and displays four objectives: characterise the production of a decentralised time rule, describe and analyse inequalities of the rule, question the tension between collective and individual logic of time savings, analyse the time / money transformation (monetisation). We have created a comparable codified database for France and Germany (600 company agreements on each side) in order to carry out statistical processing. The results first show that the time-saving account is a central device for managing the economic and social life of enterprises. They then indicate that the time-saving account takes different forms in different societal configurations (France, Germany), by sectors of activity and by categories of employees. The purpose of the communication is to show these differences and explain the reasons for them.