Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-30
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Jean Pralong, Professor of Human Resource Management, EM Normandie
The French do not work enough. The value of work is declining… These clichés that keep circulating in the public debate on the left — to congratulate themselves — and on the right — to lament — even though the facts prove the opposite with astonishing regularity. What if this received idea, developed in the 1980s, was the first fake news that prevents addressing the question of work in a truly relevant way?
Great resignation, quiet quitting, supposed laziness of the new generations, crisis of meaning… the French would have disengaged from work. However, this diagnosis is forty years old. It was born in the early 1980s, during the neoliberal moment inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and has never subsided since. Long surveys measuring what the French say about work contradict it with the same consistency. Apparently in vain.
Twin Tales
At the turn of the 1980s, two discourses on the “crisis of work” emerged simultaneously, in opposing registers. On one hand, an intellectual critique proclaimed the end of the working society. André Gorz publishedFarewell to the proletariat in 1980, Roger SueTowards a leisure society? in 1982, Gilles LipovetskyThe void era in 1983. The sequence will continue fifteen years later with Jeremy Rifkin(The End of Work, 1996). The labor theory of value would fade behind contemporary individualism: the critique comes from the intellectual left, accompanying the end of Fordism.
On the other hand, a managerial and employer discourse takes hold, following closely the election of Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1981): Western employees would not be working enough, their productivity would be falling compared to Asian competitors, and labor law rigidities would be killing us. Ezra Vogel publishesJapan as Number One in 1979A; William OuchiTheory Z in 1981A; Tom Peters and Robert WatermanIn Search of Excellence in 1982. Japan becomes the mirror in which the West looks at itself and discovers its deficits.
Also to read:
Are liberals and conservatives right to attack welfare and the social state?
The rhetoric of “Never enough”
In France, the 1983 austerity turning point marks the alignment of the left in power with this competitive grammar; the employers’ association, through the voice of Yvon Gattaz and then his successors at the CNPF, makes “never enough” its main rhetoric. The French employee is never sufficiently aware of economic issues, never sufficiently committed, never sufficiently productive. “While you laze, the Japanese work” is the cliché of the 1980s. Germany will replace Japan in the 1990s, which will then be replaced by Korea, then China… Although the country with which France is compared changes, the conclusion remains the same: a permanent deficit of the French employee, measured against a benchmark of another who is always more industrious.
If the two narratives lead to opposing policies, they converge on a shared intuition: the relationship to work has changed. It is this intuition that settles in for forty years.
However, there is a system, the European Values Study (EVS), which precisely measures what the French say about work in their lives, and which has been measured at regular intervals since 1981. Initiated by European researchers, conducted in France under the direction of Hélène Riffault, summarized essentially by Jean Stoetzel inThe values of the present time (PUF, 1983), it surveys a representative sample approximately every nine years. Five waves to date: 1981, 1990, 1999, 2008, 2018.
The ever-renewed centrality of work
The question is simple: “Would you say that work is very important, quite important, somewhat important, or not at all important in your life?” The answers “very important”: 60% in 1990, 69% in 1999, 68% in 2008, a comparable level in 2018. The subjective centrality of work is one of the most stable data points that social sciences have measured over four decades.
Worse for the dominant narrative: France is among the European countries where work retains the highest declared centrality. The survey published in 2023 by the Institut Montaigne with Kantar Public, conducted on 5,001 workers and titledThe French at work: overcoming preconceived ideas– symptomatic title of the gap -, confirms: high and stable job satisfaction, despite a massively felt intensification.
What is happening, then?Another series of surveys, conducted since 1978 by the DARES and renewed every seven years(Working conditions 1978, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2013, 2016, 2019), documents precisely what has actually changed, less in the relationship to work than in its concrete conditions of exercise. The pace constraints have multiplied – in 2016, one employee out of three is subject to at least three simultaneous pace constraints. The mental workload has increased. Real autonomy, despite the rhetoric of empowerment and responsibility, is declining. Work under pressure has become permanently commonplace.
When the solution makes the problem worse
This degradation is not a side effect. It accompanies the importation, since the 1980s, of managerial practices born from the employers’ diagnosis: lean management, flexibilization, just-in-time, quality circles, individualization of objectives, continuous evaluation. The “never enough” has produced concrete mechanisms that intensify work. The diagnosis and its treatment form a single movement.
Two facts therefore coexist: work still matters just as much to the French, even though the conditions of work have hardened – precisely because the dominant managerial grammar wanted it that way. The suffering documented by surveys is not a sign of subjective withdrawal. It is the effect of a maintained centrality under degraded conditions caused by the very effort to combat a disengagement that was not happening.
Why the story persists
Under these conditions, if the narrative of “never enough” persists, it is because it never had the function of describing, but of justifying. It is, first of all, a rhetorical device that produces the demand for expertise supposed to resolve it. The annual barometerState of the Global Workplace published by Gallup, which has been quantifying the global “disengagement” for twenty years, is the archetype: it documents by measuring what it needs to observe to justify its consulting business. McKinsey inaugurated the genre at the end of the 1990s with its War for Talent report – another scarcity narrative intended to sell expertise. Each wave of the narrative feeds a market.
The framework also has a generational function: to present each cohort entering the labor market as different from the previous one. Baby boomers were already suspected in 1968 of having “refused work”; Generation X “no longer invested themselves as before” in the 1990s; Generation Y had a “need for meaning” in the 2000s; Generation Z supposedly now “lacks motivation.” The rupture is always generational and always new.
A political function at last: it is used alternately to justify flexibilization (“young people no longer want to commit”) and to denounce it (“neoliberalism has killed the meaning of work”). It can be used by all sides.
Also to read:
Radical vote: what work teaches us about the angers that divide
Ongoing suspicions
But these functions conceal a deeper matrix: a device of permanent suspicion towards the employee, born in the neoliberal moment of the early 1980s and which has since never ceased to reinvent itself. However, if we take the data seriously, engagement, loyalty, or employer branding policies are not aimed at disengaged employees.
They are aimed at employees who are committed to work in organizations that are increasingly failing to keep their promises. As long as suffering is seen as withdrawal, the attempt is to re-engage people who were never disengaged by piling up measures that worsen what they claim to address. If it is understood for what it is — a thwarted commitment — one is forced to look at what, within organizations, frustrates this commitment: unnegotiated intensification, reclaimed autonomy, meaning promised but not delivered.
Jean Pralong does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institution.
–ref. “The French no longer want to work”: genealogy of a suspicion that is forty years old –https://theconversation.com/the-french-no-longer-want-to-work-genealogy-of-a-suspicion-that-is-forty-years-old-281780