Sooo many errors in this sneering and ahistorical post.
France voted-in that famous and world-leading 35-hour workweek as a 4-hour jumpdown from a 39-hour workweek in 1997 when unemployment was 12.6%. It took complete hold in early 2001 after several delays but with many companies anticipating. And before the US-led recession hit France in summer 2001, unemployment had come down to 8.6%. That's 1% less unemployment per hourcut, same result as the USA got in 1938-40 when the overtime section of the Fair Labor Standards Act set the maximum workweek at 44-42-40 in 1938-39-40 and unemployment went 19.0%-17.2%-14.6%.
The "disaster" claimed is indeed just a dramatization of a cluster of tacticl problems as mentioned in Clavalle's comment below.
The "infamous" "radical" "disastrous" 35-hour workweek was adopted by some of the most conservative industries in the USA as early as the 1950s, such as insurance and academe. The workweek for clerks in that radical! industry on Wall Street was 37.5 hours in the 1960s. "2pasc" seems to be very easily "surprised and disappointed" indeed, possibly assumes that Moses brought down the frozen Forty Hour Work Week from Mt. Sinai along with the Ten Commandments, when in fact, between 1840 and 1940 the American workweek was cut in half, from over 80 to 40, via the fight for the 10-hour day generally achieved by 1865, and then the fight for the 8-hour day.
The 35-hr wkwk's problem is the same as the 40. No level is permanently freezable when we are not frozen at the same level of worksaving technology. And when productive innovation is constantly injected against a workweek frozen at any level, however low-sounding to current ears, it gets responded-to by downsizing, leaving us with the folly of trying to get growth=UPsizing by downsizing. So yes, it should have been further lowered. In fact, as outlined in timesizingdotcom, chronic overtime needs to be energetically converted into training&hiring and the workweek needs to be regularly and repeatedly adjusted downward, as far as it takes, to create enough convertible overtime to achieve full employment and maximum consumer spending. The USA nationally hasn't nicked the workweek one nanosecond since 1940 and the resulting overt and covert downsizing has resulted in mind-boggling welfare, 'disability,' homelessness, begging, crime, a world-record prison population, suicide, longer&longer hours due to job insecurity, lots of quiet featherbedding, employee pilferage and sabotage, and clientless self-'employment', all of which people who talk the talk of freedom but are leary of the real thing, like "2pasc", seem to overlook or be OK with. But many "smartest minds" would prefer a world-leading low workweek to a world-leading prison population.
The real freedom? the most basic freedom? Free Time, without which the other freedoms are meaningless or inaccessible. The promise of technology is to make life easier for everyone. That promise is betrayed when technology is responded-to by downsizing. That promise is only kept and delivered-upon when technology is responded-to by what might be called timesizing, as much as it takes to maintain or raise employment and economy-anchoring domestic consumer spending. Otherwise you get the Ford-Reuther Paradox: Henry Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Walter Reuther, "Let's see you sell'em cars."