Greens call for 32-hour week

GREEN party Europe Ecologie-Les Verts is proposing a 32-hour working week.

The party has adopted the idea as part of its manifesto for the 2012 presidential elections.

It made the decision at a conference at the weekend, when it also confirmed its nominations for the parliamentary elections next June.

Nominated for the Amboise constituency in the Indre-et-Loire, Christophe Rossignol said the aim was to reduce the numbers of unemployed, which he said were, at four million, a million more than a year ago.

“Our role is therefore to propose solutions. Afterwards there will be negotiations with our partners,” he said.

Nominated for Paris’s 10th constituency, colleague Denis Baupin said: “Reducing working time is written in history. We’re not saying it’s simple, but neither is four million unemployed.”

The party’s national secretary, Jacques Archimbaud, said the debate on the 32-hour week was part of a vision for a new kind of society. “We want to encourage firms to propose sabbaticals or new ways of sharing out work,” he said.

As part of their plan for 2012 the ecologists also claim they would create 600,000 new jobs linked to the “green economy”.

A Socialist MP for Paris, Jean-Marie Le Guen has said the greens are “in complete denial of reality”.

“They have got into the habit, more than ever in recent months, of imagining an ideal world. Between the ideal and reality there is a gap that they do not try to bridge.”