Would Shortened Work Week Turn S.F. Into France? No. Into Oakland? Maybe.

Library of Congress

Market Street is not the Champs-Élysées, and San Francisco isn't turning into France

​When Mayor Gavin Newsom last week leaked to the press a tentative plan to cut tens of thousands of city workers' weeks from 40 to 37.5 hours, many observers must have felt like Rocky standing alongside Bullwinkle the Magician. Again? But that trick never works!

Slashing work-weeks has a checkered record -- though, to be fair, other American cities, counties, and even states have done just that in these troubled times (it's not all that different from furloughing). Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda notes that Oakland's city workers have long punched the clock after 37.5 hours. Yet the most famous instance of the government attempting to slash the work week in the face of a poor economy took place overseas, in France. A decade ago, the nation's Socialist government introduced a 35-hour work week (for everyone -- not just the public sector). This was sold as a job-creating measure. And -- quelle surprise -- that didn't happen. But those who were lucky enough to have a job often complained that they now had less time to do more work.

Some of the city's top number-crunchers assured SF Weekly that the proposed work-week reduction won't put us down a similar path. Peg Stevenson, the director of the city's performance group, stresses that this is not a job-creation measure but a staving-off-mass-layoffs measure. There is a difference. But as for folks having less time to do more work -- because there are going to be layoffs, too -- we'll see about that.

"There has to be an understanding that there's going to be less work done," said Zmuda. Again, we'll see how that works. In the meantime, here's some more fun facts about the joys of getting fired and rehired to a curtailed work week:

Since San Francisco is a city that can find amazing ways to lose money on just about everything we wondered if this, too, was a blueprint for lost dollars. What if workers can't handle their new shorter weeks, work longer, and then earn overtime?

Stevenson replied that the city is currently examining how to avoid doing just that. Department heads and managers are going over the preliminary list of what classifications of workers would be suitable for work-week reduction -- "they'll tell us if we understand the job function correctly." This, ostensibly, would keep a workers whose jobs can't be cut back or staggered from earning OT. And this is complicated further by the fact that some classifications of worker start earning OT pay after their 40th hour, while others would earn it on their 38th.

Overtime-heavy departments such as police and fire fighters, of course, wouldn't have their work weeks touched -- it'd be a surefire recipe for massive overtime payouts (in fact, the fire department is already racking up a killer OT bill). Might this lead to massive resentment between city departments? Stevenson says it sure could. 

Who will and who won't be asked to work less is a decision that is totally in flux -- meaning the projected savings are all over the map as well. Zmuda said the city has so far prepared a low, medium, and high estimate. The $50 million savings floated to the press is the medium figure.

Stevenson said there's "no specific deadline" for department heads et al. to finish combing through the list of the tens of thousands of employees who might be fired and re-hired at fewer hours. But, naturally, the city always wants things done yesterday; the sooner that payroll is shed, the sooner you can stop paying for it. That being said, it seems to be a stretch that this could get done before the end of the fiscal year on June 30.

First, the city would have to comb through its roster in the aforementioned move to determine who can cost-effectively be made to work less. Then it has to double-check those decisions. Then, the Department of Human Resources has to undergo legal calisthenics with regard to properly handling the mass layoff notices, which must be delivered a minimum of 60 days before the jobs are actually cut. Then paperwork has to be tossed around regarding massive re-hirings at different schedules and salaries. "So, you know, we're probably looking at the end of the fiscal year," says Zmuda.

Well, as the French would say, "Dit moi si ca marche pour vous" -- tell me how that works out for you.