That’s a lot less far-out than it sounds. Founded 15 years ago, Slow Food was at first a reaction to the proliferation of McDonald’s outlets around Italy. Committed to combating “the evils of fast food” and, in a larger way, the global spread of the American 24/7/365 work culture, the movement now has 66,000 adherents around the world. They mobilize to protect local products from being driven into extinction by global brands. And, true to their name, they hold lots of really long lunches and dinners celebrating obscure sheep’s-milk cheeses or cave-cured lard. “At the heart of our mission is the right to pleasure,” says Slow Food’s international director, Renato Sardo. “That can often be misunderstood by the Anglo-Saxon world.”
The argument for a Slow Europe is not only that slow is good, but also that it can work. In 1999 Slow Food gave birth to the Slow City movement, which started in the tiny Tuscan town of Greve and has since spread throughout Italy. The organization has turned around local economies by promoting local goods and tourism, and now has a waiting list of cities hoping to copy the success of its members. Young Italians are moving from larger cities to Bra, where unemployment is only 5 percent, about half the nationwide rate. Slow food and wine festivals draw thousands of tourists every year. Shops are thriving, many with sales rising at a rate of 15 percent per year. “This is our answer to globalization,” says Paolo Saturnini, the founder of Slow Cities and mayor of Greve.
As Europe transforms itself into a single market as large and as rich as the United States, the question of how to define the new Europe has never been more pressing. But the continent is in no rush. The sputtering of America’s high-tech, high-stress New Economy has European leaders increasingly skeptical of a U.S. model they seemed eager to copy as recently as the EU summit in Lisbon last year. Urged on by Anglo Prime Minister Tony Blair, the summiteers agreed then to push an aggressive, American-style plan to free capital and labor markets, and generally minimize government limits on the freedom of corporations and the pace of working life.
That was then. Now each new piece of bad news from Nasdaq seems to reaffirm Europe’s old fear of brutally free U.S. markets. While George W. Bush was touring the Continent this month, the European Union was pondering new rules that would make it easier to block megamergers, stop layoffs, regulate the Internet and generally tame the frenetic qualities of the New Economy. The Slow Cities are only an extreme case of a backlash against the American culture of haste that is showing up in European views on law and economics, even its latest lifestyle trends.
France is the favored proving ground for proponents of what might be called slow economics. Most outsiders (Anglos particularly) have long been skeptical of the French model: short hours, long vacations and strong protections for jobs and industries. Indeed the French were famous for a minimalist work ethic even before they cut the workweek to 35 hours for larger companies last year. Yet the French are more productive on an hourly basis than counterparts in the United States and Britain, and have been for years. Experts find this baffling. High unemployment in France means that the least productive French workers simply don’t have jobs. And most French are educated to a strict national standard, regardless of socioeconomic class, which may equip the work force to handle complex work assignments. But even British economists are starting to concede that not working too hard for too long may also be a critical factor. “It’s probably fair to say that you’re less productive at 9 p.m. than you were at 2 p.m.,” says Edward Bannerman, the head of economics at the Centre for European Reform in London.
The mystery of French productivity has fueled a Europewide debate about the merits of working more slowly. Two weeks ago the Industrial Society in Britain released a report challenging the notion that lightly regulated, Anglo-Saxon-style labor markets are the only route to competitiveness and productivity. The report notes that the 35-hour workweek in France has actually increased labor-market flexibility by allowing employers to institute weekend, evening and holiday shifts, and forcing workers to spread out vacations rather than take off months at a time. Likewise, the shorter week in France hasn’t scared away foreign investors, though many economists speculated that it would.
As the French prove that rest and work perhaps do mix, others follow. Belgium is moving to a 35-hour week. Sweden is considering both shorter hours and longer vacations. In Germany, Volkswagen is expanding its use of a 28.8-hour week, which raised the productivity of 50,000 factory workers by more than 20 percent when it was used as a way to avert layoffs in the mid-’90s. VW found that sharing work not only raised productivity but also cut the cost of recruiting and training new workers in an upturn. “It’s easy to fire people but not so easy to create loyalty,” says French economist Francis Kramarz. “Loyalty and knowledge capital are things that contribute to economic growth, particularly in a longer-term sense.”
This idea is not new, but its application in Europe is enjoying a sudden renaissance. As recently as the Lisbon summit, governments all over the Continent were convinced that they had to make it easier for companies to hire and fire at will, in order to keep up with the fast and ruthless Americans. In 1999, when Michelin announced layoffs, France’s Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said it was not up to the government to protect workers. But he took the opposite position this April, calling British retailer Marks & Spencer’s plan to dismiss 1,700 French workers “abhorrent and shameful.” Now, as layoffs spread in France, Jospin is giving one anti-globalization speech after another. Two weeks ago his government proposed a law making it more difficult for profitmaking companies to can workers without advance notice and discussion.
The European Union is now joining the slow cause. Employment and Social Affairs Minister Anna Diamantopoulou is pushing for the revival of work councils, an old socialist institution that had gone out of style even before the dot-com boom. First introduced for the Bavarian coal industry in the early 1900s, the councils give workers a say in all major corporate moves, from mergers to layoffs and pay scales. Diamantopoulou is also preparing a green paper on business and social responsibility that includes specific advice on “best practices.” It will cite the Marks & Spencer fiasco–some employees of the British chain learned they were suddenly out of work from the radio news–as a case study of how not to handle layoffs. “The message is that social policy isn’t just an afterthought to economics,” says Diamantopoulou. “It can be part and parcel of a smart business strategy.”
The pace of work is emerging as a serious point of contention in Anglo-Saxon and Continental views of the new Europe. Britons and Americans still tend to dismiss the idea of a social contract between workers and management, and embrace a hired-gun system in which neither party owes the other very much. Marks & Spencer insists it handled its layoffs appropriately, and British business is fighting the EU directive on work councils. “We don’t think this is what we joined the EU for,” says John Cridland, deputy director-general of the Confederation of British Industry. “We are deeply against a one-size-fits-all solution for European business.”
Yet all of Europe is subject to a quickening agent larger than itself. In increasingly competitive global markets, companies are leery of hiring workers they can’t shed fast. Of the 1.5 million jobs created in France over the last two years, nearly all are the kind of temp positions Europe once scorned as low-pay, no-future “Mcjobs.” (Until recently, running a temp agency was actually a criminal offense in Greece.) The surprise, now, is that Europeans at all levels of the social ladder are coming to embrace temp work as an alternative to the 24-hour-a-day rush of the 1990s. A 1999 EU survey showed that 77 percent of temps chose part-time work because it gave them more time for stuff like hobbies or going to the movies.
Of course, European part-timers are cutting much sweeter deals than their American counterparts. French law now gives temps the same benefits as salaried workers, including health care and retirement pay. They even get a 10 percent tax rebate to help boost their salaries. The Manpower temp agency found that nearly one quarter of the 150,000 people it places every day in France choose temping for the flexible schedule. And they are not only lowly office workers.
More and more, the bosses are temps, too. Typically, they are veteran executives–CEOs, investment bankers, consultants–looking for a slower life. Hired for short-term projects like launching a new product, these “interim managers” might work hard for six months, then spend the next six months sailing with their families. The market for interim managers is growing 30 percent a year, and they now bill out as much as [Pound sterling]400 million a year in Britain, according to the Institute of Interim Management. Dena McCallum, cofounder of the Eden McCallum interim-management firm in London, says many of her recruits are ex-dot-comers: “A lot of them feel burned out. They gave their lifeblood to a company, and maybe the company collapsed.” Her talent pool includes Charlie MacKinnon, who quit his job as a Goldman Sachs banker last summer after buying two homes and prepaying school fees for his three children for several years. “You should always want your boss’s job,” says MacKinnon. “I didn’t.” He is now studying to be a landscape gardener.
Opting out has a growing cachet. In their puritan way, Americans still tend to believe that being busy is the same as being important. Europeans are more likely to admire those who do anything other than office toil, perhaps now more than ever. That’s true even in Britain, the European work culture closest to the American. Applications to Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas organization rose 59 percent from 1999 to 2000. A growing number of recruits are executives from companies like Shell and American Express. “Leaving your job shows confidence about your job prospects,” says Sue Randall, a former VSO worker and author of “Material World,” a report on the new volunteer culture. The idea is that if you can afford to quit working for a year or two, then you must be at the top of the heap.
So even high-powered people seek out the slow lane. Of 7.2 million millionaires worldwide, 32 percent live in Europe, and their numbers are growing faster in Europe than anywhere else. According to the Henley Centre, a market-research group in London, a fast-growing proportion of Europeans’ income is spent on services that involve luxury, leisure, stress management–a general easing of the pace that made them rich.
Now European business is catering to the man or woman who would rather not be on the go. In May the British drugstore Boots unveiled a multilevel health-and-beauty center where clients can have their nails buffed, their backs rubbed and their time-management skills critiqued by a life coach. Stressed-out Spaniards are flocking to massage bars, and Roman executives are consulting herbalists. First-class travelers like to feel as if they never left home. The increasingly popular boutique hotels are starting to look like cozy-chic apartments. A new bar at the Hempel Hotel in London could be mistaken for someone’s living room, with stylish patrons reclining on white couches set amid leather-bound books and a flickering fire. Later this year Hilton International will introduce special rooms with mood music, ambient lighting and aromatherapy for the harried exec. Hilton VP Geoffrey Breeze notes that the average male road warrior has only 82 minutes of private time a day, and females get half that. “They crave peace and quiet in an otherwise stressful environment,” says Breeze.
The culture of deceleration has even reached the workplace itself. Chiswick Park, a new office complex under construction in West London, guarantees clients “the right to enjoy work,” and features a man-made lake with waterfall, two dance studios and an on-site concierge. In London, where you can order up a midnight massage or schedule a tai chi class at dawn, there is still an element of 24/7 mania even in the new desire to take it easy.
The Italians take a more determinedly languorous approach. Last year when the government loosened restrictions on store hours, many businessmen were outraged. The retail-trade group Confcommercio warned that shopkeepers would feel pressure to work too hard, and consumers would suffer as the level of courtesy and “smile willingness” fell. Confcommercio lost that fight, and the rules were relaxed to little effect. Most merchants continue to run their shops at a leisurely pace.
Europeans are still struggling to define just how slow is fast enough. Even at the Lisbon summit, where EU leaders promised to create “the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010,” they also promised to do it “with social inclusion.” Back then no one was paying much attention to the social side, but they are now. In Greve, the capital of the Slow Cities, legislating la dolce vita has actually ensured the economic future of the city, says Mayor Saturnini. Car fumes are down, foot traffic is up and tourism is booming as wearied travelers from around the world come and pay handsomely for a chance to unwind. “In the ’70s and ’80s we didn’t think about quality; we just built more buildings, more hotels, more shops,” says Saturnini. “Now, we want to preserve what’s best about our lifestyle–the good taste of the food, the wine, the air.” In Greve, set deep amid the vineyards, no roaring Vespas disrupt the quiet trattorias that sell food grown by local farmers. Slow rules. And there’s always plenty of time for lunch.
