According to the auditor general, as the public sector represents around 30% of the total labour work force, its health and well being is crucial to the effective delivery of public services.
Despite the robust growth of the French economy, few within the government expect the 35-hour week to perform job-creating miracles for the tenth of the labour force still without work.
America has a smaller fraction of prime-age men in work and in the labour force than any other G7 economy.
So the next line of defence against hysteresis is to keep the jobless in the labour force, actively looking for work.
Rich Europe also uses more of its available brainpower because it has more people in the labour force and keeps them at work for longer.
The unemployment number just looks at those actively looking for work, therefore if labour force participation stays low it will only take modest job growth to be responsible for the unemployment rate to enjoy a significant decline.
The participation rate, the share of the labour force either working or looking for work, has declined steadily since 2007, though it ticked up ever so slightly in September, to 63.6% (see chart).
By making it easier for women to work, it boosts the size of the labour force.
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The ministry does not express the jobseeker figure as a percentage of the work force, as done by the International Labour Organization.
The Labour Force Survey, which estimates the numbers out of work, puts the unemployment rate at 7.9% for the period September to November last year.
Flexibility, it appears, increases participation in the labour force as well as the number of people in work: unemployment will fall only if the rise in participation is less than the rise in the number at work.
And in the long run later retirement and other reforms will expand the labour force and thus potential output, whereas higher taxes dull incentives to work and invest.
More troubling, unemployment in the past two years would have been even higher but for a disturbing lack of growth in the labour force: that is, the number of people either working or searching for work.
ECONOMIST: Troubling trends behind the falling unemployment rate
Perhaps surprisingly, there is little work on the macroeconomic effect of all the extra women who have entered the labour force over the past four decades, but McKinsey reckons that America's GDP is now about 25% higher than it would have been without them.
But fewer people remained out of the labour force altogether: 21.1% of the working-age population was neither in work nor looking for a job, the lowest rate since 1992.
If statistics were to take into account all those who are able to work but who receive social benefits instead, unemployment figures would rise to over 20% of the labour force.
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