The citizens of France are once again taking a pasting on the op-ed pages. Their failing this time is not that they are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as they were thought to be during the invasion of Iraq, but rather that they voted to reject the new European Union constitution. According to the pundits, this was the timid, shortsighted choice of a backward- looking people afraid to face the globalized future. But another way of looking at it is that the French were simply trying to hold on to their perks -- their cradle-to-grave welfare state and, above all, their cherished 35-hour workweek. What’s so bad about that? There was a time when the 35-hour workweek was the envy of the world, and especially of Americans, who used to travel to France just so they could watch the French relax. Some people even moved to France, bought farmhouses, adjusted their own internal clocks and wrote admiring, best-selling books about the leisurely and sensual French lifestyle. But no more. The future, we are told, belongs to the modem-day Stakhanovites, who, like the famous Stalinist-era coal miner, are eager to exceed their quotas: to the people in India, say, who according to Thomas L. Friedman are eager to work a 35-hour day, not a 35-hour week. Even the Japanese, once thought to be workaholics, are mere sluggards compared with people in Hong Kong, where 70 percent of the work force now puts in more than 50 hours a week. In Japan the percentage is just 63 percent, though the Japanese have started what may become the next big global trend by putting the elderly to work. According to figures recently published in The Wall Street Journal, 71 percent of Japanese men between the ages of 60 and 64 still work, compared with 57 percent of American men the same age. In France, needless to say, the number is much lower. By the time they reach 60, only 17 percent of Frenchmen, fewer than one in five, are still punching the clock. The rest are presumably sitting in the cafe, fretting over the Turks, Bulgarians and Romanians, who, if they were admitted to the European Union, would come flooding over the French border and work day and night for next to nothing. How could the futurologists be so wrong? George Jetson, we should recall -- the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become -- worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it. Who does the word 'Stakhanovites' refers to according to the passage?