FRENCH cafés and restaurants may be forced to shrink their already limited opening hours after a court decision on working time that has dismayed owners, waiters and the Government.

Owners of the country’s 200,000 eating and drinking establishments have been ordered to apply the 35-hour week that guarantees most French workers Europe’s shortest working time. The bosses must also pay retroactive overtime for the past 22 months.

The decision by the Conseil d’État, the highest civil court, was greeted with horror by owners and many of the trade’s 800,000 employees amid warnings that it could force small establishments out of business. They appealed for state action to soften the impact.

Under a 2004 accord, catering workers were allowed to work a 39-hour week. This had already led to restaurants cutting costs by such measures as turning away lunchtime customers who arrive after 1.30pm.

The court has annulled the accord. Applying the 35-hour week could force restaurants to close three days a week or refuse a second dinner sitting, owners said.

“The application of a strict 35 hours in a restaurant like mine is impossible,” said Pierre Negrevergne, manager of the Terrasse Mirabeau in the expensive 16th arrondissement of Paris. “If a customer stays in the dining room after a meal, I am not going to order him off the premises.”

At le Marivaux, a brasserie on the Boulevard des Italiens in Central Paris, Daniel, a veteran waiter, said: “I simply don’t know what’s going to happen.” André Daguin, President of UMIH, the main catering owners’ association, said that the council had “managed to transform a win-win agreement into a lose-lose situation” that would penalise workers as well as owners.

Steep payroll charges and tight regulations have caused a shortage of waiters and cooks in the catering establishments that help France to attract more visitors than any other nation.

The council took up the case on an appeal by the CFDT, one of the big three trade union federations, which was not part of the 2004 pact. The union insisted yesterday that waiting staff would be better off under the new regime, in which employers will have to pay overtime for work beyond 35 hours.

Other unions disagreed, citing extra leave that staff will now lose.

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