Ministre du Travail, de la Santé et des Solidarités

Statistical service DARES – RPTT

78 Rue Olivier de Serres - tour Olivier de Serres - 75015 Paris

Hours worked indicator is the time worked for an employee subject to the weekly duration declared by his employer.

NACE Rev. 2

Market units Sections B to N, P to S

Hours worked indicator is a theoretical duration and not an effective duration. It’s the amount of time worked by an employee subject to the weekly duration as declared by his employer and who is taking all his holidays and his days off also reported by his employer. The data are not available for the self-employed. The total of hours worked is approximated by the number of hours worked by employees.

The hours worked indicator is compiled from the average number of employees multiplied by the average working time.

Average working time:

— proportion of employees working in very small companies (less than 10 employees) * annual collectively agreed working time in these companies

added to

— proportion of employees working in units with more than 10 employees * annual collectively agreed working time in these units.

This annual working time is finally divided by 4 to obtain hours worked in a quarter.

This indicator is calculated each quarter for industry, construction, whole sale and retail trade and services according to NACE Rev.2 classification. The data are index data and are presented in the following forms : unadjusted, calendar adjusted and seasonally adjusted.

Enterprises or establishments (in the sense of a local unit)

Entreprises or establishments (units) in mercantile sector excluding agriculture in metropolitan France (until 2017)

Metropolitan France until 2021, France (except Mayotte) after. Activities outside the geographical coverage are not included in the data.

The hours worked series for Metropolitan France is available from 1999.

2021

Year 2021 = 100

Quarter

The reference legislation for INSEE and the ministerial statistics units consists of law 51-711 of June 7, 1951, as amended, on statistical reporting requirements, coordination, and secrecy. Legal obligation to provide data: “label d’intérêt général” delivered by the CNIS (Conseil National de l’Information statistique - National Council for Statistical Information).

The European Parliament and Council adopted the European Business Statistics (EBS) Regulation (EU) 2019/2152 on 27 November 2019, followed by the Commission Implementing Regulation 2020/1197 laying down technical specifications and arrangements pursuant to the mentioned EBS Regulation (General Implementing Act).

The former legal basis for the STS indicators is the Council Regulation No 1165/98 of 19 May 1998 concerning short-term statistics and subsequent amending regulations.

The references to the EBS Regulation and its implementing legal acts can be found on the Eurostat website. 

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All statistics collected and published by INSEE are governed by the statistical (amended) Law of the 7th June 1951 ”concerning the obligation, the coordination and the secrecy as regards statistics”. The protection of private information during data processing is covered by the Law of the 6th January 1978 “concerning data processing, files and freedoms”.

Data are disseminated in level A88. Risks of disclosing data on enterprises exist at this level. To guard against the Acemo data are published only when the number of respondents in each stratum and contribution by stratum are sufficient.

A quarterly calendar is producted for the year.

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Not available with the exception of the data that were disseminated by Eurostat

Quarterly

None

The hours worked indicator is released quarterly in “DARES Indicateur, Activité et conditions d’emploi de la main d’œuvre” (ACEMO)” (in global, not by section). It can be found on the Ministry website : https://dares.travail-emploi.gouv.fr

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Data is sent to Eurostat

The documentation on methodology is internal and is not disseminated

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Quality checks and validation of data are done on the basis of the latest update of the hours worked by sections and by usual quality checks in the process of validation of data.

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The hours worked are calculated quarterly on exhaustive field required by the EBS regulation.

However, the indicator calculated at present, does not reflect the real variations of hours effectively worked by the employees, but is the best possible account held by what is imposed by the regulation (in terms of deadlines and level of disintegration). Indeed, the elements of variabilities (such as extra hours, sick leaves, maternity and occupational accidents, short time working or for bad weather, days of strike) are not available within the time limits allowed and on the level asked by the regulation and are not considered in the calculation. Partial unemployment and its effect on hours effectively worked caused by the covid-19 crisis has been taken into account. Partial unemployment data are revised for the previous quarters. 

The accuracy consists on eliminating as much as possible non-sampling errors, by studying revisions.

The quarterly Acemo survey is exhaustive above 250 employees. Sample rates of 6,5%, 9,1%, 30,3% and 61,7% are used below this threshold respectively for establishments with 10 to 19 employees, 50 to 99 employees, 20 to 49 employees and 100 to 249 employees.

The non-sampling error is not available for the hours worked but can be approached through the response rates in the different surveys compiled to produce the indicator.

Quarterly and annual “ACEMO” surveys: stratified by activity and enterprise size. The response rate is approximately 80 % for quarterly « Acemo » survey (and often 90 % in the 250 and more employees entreprises) and 65 % for the annual « Acemo » survey until 2004.

“ACEMO TPE” (for “very small enterprises”) survey: stratified by activity, enterprise size and region. The response rate is approximately 65 % for the « ACEMO-TPE ».

To increase the rate of response, phone or mail recall and penalties are made for data collection.

In Acemo, non respondents are given the arithmetic mean of all responding units in the same stratum.

For the indicator no data processing (imputation, etc.) is done.

The hours worked indicator for quarter T is available about 3 months after the end of the quarter

Delivered at the Eurostat’s deadline (approximately T+ 3 months)

Quarterly Acemo survey data are representative by size and sector, not at regional level.

Changes in information collection due to the suppression of the annual “ACEMO” survey in 2004, which has little impact on the series as far as it was only used for part of the calculation. In 2018, the Acemo survey changed its survey population in several sectors. Retropolated adjustment were made on the raw data of concened series to ensure comparability over time.

France also produces another indicator for another Eurostat regulation on hours worked (Regulation on the European System of National and Regional Accounts in the European Union), available later and in a less disaggregated way by sector, which is based on individual data and which accounts for the actual duration of work and its seasonal variations during the year.

The aggregates are always consistent with their main sub-aggregates.

2012, Costs : 2 070 hours / Burden : 2 497 hours estimated for all the persons who worked on the data at the Dares and equal to one and a half full-time equivalent.

No systematic revision policy for this data but periodically we question our practices

Data were revised each quarter (retropolation)

Quarterly and annual “ACEMO” sample surveys (Dares) (in quarterly Acemo survey about 38000 units are surveyed)

DSN (Déclaration Sociale Nominative)

“ACEMO-TPE” survey (Dares)

INSEE series of employment

SI-APART (Partial Activity Information System) and DSN for series of partial activity (DGEFP-ASP-Dares)

Collection all quarter long for quarterly “ACEMO” survey.

Collection all year long for annual “ACEMO” and “ACEMO-TPE”

Postal questionnaires for Acemo surveys

Exhaustive basis of contracts in the DSN

Exhaustive basis of requests for partial activity submitted by companies in SI-APART

Intra dataset checks

In Acemo, data are weighting and adjusting for non-response

The series are trading days ajusted and corrected for seasonnal (for part time rate ; the method is multiplicative) and calendar (with a country specific calendar) variations each quarter in 2-digit level. The series are transformed into indices based on values in 2021.

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