
In France, New Review of 35-Hour Workweek - luu
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/business/international/france-has-second-thoughts-on-its-35-hour-workweek.html?_r=0
======
bato
When I was living in France, I thought it was a great idea.

As a white collar (so not being bound to the 9 to 5 and sometimes pulling in
36h shifts...), the system worked as such:

I would work 5 days a week, and get an extra day off of my choice every
fortnight.

The results were really great for me and people I knew:

I no longer needed to take days off to deal with paperwork, and other
administrative tasks, I could finally get an appointment with my banker. I
could afford to go to the day market to buy fresh produce.

I knew of married couples that would alternate theirs to be on days where the
kids didn't have school (traditionally wednesdays) so they didn't have to
source someone to watch over the kids on a traditionally very busy day for
childcare.

Obviously the system is not perfect, but surely as work gets "easier" the way
forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them...

~~~
nrao123
Because of Robots- the whole world may move to a 3 day work week. Here is
Larry Page on that.

 _“If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself
happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids—anthropologists have been
identifying these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things,”
he said. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that
actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1% at
the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet
people’s needs is just not true.”

“You just reduce work time,” Page said. “Most people, if I ask them, ‘Would
you like an extra week of vacation?’ They raise their hands, 100% of the
people. ‘Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?’ Everyone will raise
their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time
with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way
to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the
workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and
people will still have jobs.”_

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/07/07/googles-l...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/07/07/googles-
larry-page-on-the-40-hour-work-week-jm-keynes-got-there-first/)

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem with that is that the best jobs (such as google) are competitive.
Even if two people competing for the same job only want to work 30 hours per
week, they both know that they can make themselves more attractive to the
employer by offering to work more hours than the other person. This is
especially true for immigrant groups competing with domestic labour.

The state could regulate the working week to 30 hours, but this will impact
GDP and thus the state's ability to provide public services via taxation and
also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more
wealthy.

~~~
jo_
I'm not sure I follow. The same reasoning kinda' applies now: I can work more
than 40 hours per week to look like a better applicant, but this becomes both
counterproductive and untenable at a certain point. (There are a finite number
of hours in a week.) Sure, there are times when you have to put in overtime,
like when a big release is about to come out or there's a critical bug, but
largely you should be able to finish your work in the allocated time. If this
is consistently not the case, then you (the 'royal you') are either
understaffed, ill managed, or incompetent. (Again, I don't mean to call you
personally incompetent, I mean 'you' as a member of the workforce.)

I think with the insistence that 30 hours is full time we'll see fewer
worthless meetings and less overhead, since time is now a scarce commodity.
Think about it: that ten hours is a two-hour meeting every day. If I say, "I
will work 60 hours a week every week," to my new employer, they'll look at
each other with great incredulity. There isn't necessarily 60 hours of
productive mental time each week. Given, I'm neither the smartest nor the most
focused person in the world, but I think I could only do 20 hours of hard,
focused mental work each week at my last job. The remaining 20 hours was
mindless email, bug reports, writing documentation, or drawing XML diagrams
which spelled profane words when zoomed out enough.

There will always be people who want or need to work more than the standard.
That's okay. What reducing the work week means to me, though, is fewer people
filling in their days with useless padding. If you're done after 30 hours,
that's okay -- go home!

~~~
icelancer
Law firms don't see it this way.

> I can work more than 40 hours per week to look like a better applicant, but
> this becomes both counterproductive and untenable at a certain point.

~~~
jo_
They might not, but that doesn't mean we should make concessions to them. I
agree that it's important to consider the practical aspects of a law's use,
but we shouldn't avoid making laws because some groups will ignore them. In
fact, in this case I think it adds even more incentive to drive down the work
week time because then all the people working 40-hour weeks will be
contributing over the minimum.

------
diverse41
The 35 hours law was implemented very differently for blue collar vs white
collar workers.

For white collar workers (including software/it people), the law was
implemented with a certain number of extra days/weeks of vacation per year,
above the standard 5. And each company had it different.

So if one talks about the 35 hours law in France about software/it workers,
please do not start counting weekly hours. Ask about how many weeks of
vacation instead.

Accordingly, when I moved from France to the US, for the same company, i lost
a few weeks of vacation, but boy, the days were WAY shorter.

~~~
nandemo
> a certain number of extra days/weeks of vacation per year, above the
> standard 5.

No doubt you mean "standard 5 [weeks]" and not "days", but note that won't be
obvious to many of us in less enlightened countries like US and Japan.

~~~
diverse41
Correct, 5 weeks. I got up to 4 weeks in the US eventually.

The strangest thing for me in the US is how many people are convinced they
cannot take 2 weeks at a time, and how many are leaving days on the table each
year.

------
seanstickle
Once again, I have to point to the Results-Only Work Environment —
[http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards](http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-
standards). ROWE isn't the only way of doing this sort of thing, but it's a
good approach.

Companies hire people to produce results, not to sit in an office for a
certain number of hours. Given this, stop trying to manage where and when
people work, and start focusing on whether they are delivering results.

This endless parade of articles about work hours is reminiscent of people
discussing the threadcount of the Emperor's clothes.

~~~
tanderson92
Forgive me if I am missing something that is obvious about ROWE, but what is
to stop management from shifting the goalposts in a ROWE ? By continuously
requiring more from their workforce they are receiving more hours of work from
them while being able to say "We do not force set hours, we only require
reasonable results from our employees" ?

It simply seems easy to manipulate.

~~~
seanstickle
That's a great question, tanderson92.

Unless you've had a remarkable work experience, you'll find that bad
management shifts the goalposts in a 40-hour work environment too. "Work
harder, work faster, work smarter!" This behavior is independent of the
environment. The advantage of ROWE is that it removes a lot off waste (hours
tracking, telecommuting paperwork, microaggressions about hours worked, etc.)
and lets people actually focus on the work.

If you have executives that want to destroy the company by crushing the
workforce then, yeah, no environment will stop them.

~~~
adeptus
So what's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload when
there's no limit to how many hours you work? The usefulness of a set limit of
hours is that it protects the employee from work overload.

~~~
seanstickle
That's a reasonable concern, adeptus.

What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and
telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find
someone else to do it?

I do not mean this at all flippantly. I've worked places (and I'm sure others
have as well) where the amount of work assigned is undoable in the amount of
time available. People burn out, people deliver poor quality, people quit.

A ROWE is not meant as a mechanism to protect employees from destructive
bosses. And, for knowledge workers whose work cannot be mechanically reduced
to hours, neither is a 40-hour week.

A ROWE is about removing waste in the work process so that people can focus on
the work they're hired to do, not on outdated ritualistic traditions about
work that no longer apply.

~~~
vertex-four
> What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and
> telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find
> someone else to do it?

The thing is, under such a system, you get fired and that's the end of it, and
the employer suffers for it as well as you. They can't push people to spend
more than their 40 hours - they have to find somebody else who's willing to
put up with it for 40 hours a week, or explicitly require more.

In the ROWE system, employers can collectively gradually push their employees
to work more and more. 10 years down the line, everyone could have 50 or 60
hours worth of work to do a week, and no recourse, because every employer has
gradually done the same thing - after all, if they can get more work out of
you, they will.

~~~
Jedd
A lack of recourse would only be the case if, as you say, 'every employer has
gradually done the same thing'.

In an ideal world, all employees are able to be mobile, and would gravitate
quickly away from bad employers, incentivising employers to not be bad
(basically), and/or removing those employers / organisations from the
environment.

I respect we don't live in an ideal world, but equally we don't live in a 100%
evil - but somewhere in between the two extremes. So in practice you would see
the same things that happen now - employers that aren't evil are able to
obtain and retain better employees, in part because they don't engage in the
kinds of activities you're describing.

------
DanielBMarkham
_" in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees
across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with
productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a
welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law."_

What concerns me from a public policy perspective is that people vote on
politicians and platforms based on some simple, plain-language representation
of what they stand for. "35-hour work weeks for all!" is pretty catchy, and I
might could be behind it.

But then when the policy is implemented, it's done so in such a convoluted and
byzantine fashion that _I am not longer able as a voter to determine whether
it was a good idea or not_.

So we then begin all these partisan debates over the slogan, when in fact the
slogan was never really tried. This is a defect of centralized, complex
governments: it really has nothing to do with your political stance or what
you support or oppose. I could say the same thing about Strategic Defense
Strategy in the U.S. If something is explained on way, supported by the public
in one way, but implemented in such a way to confuse what's really going on?
The system fails.

I think the saddest result of this is watching very intelligent and passionate
people debate various positions and policies, _none of which ever have any
chance to actually be implemented in anything near the terms in which they
describe_. So it's like watching smart people debate the relative merits of
their own imaginary castles.

As a programmer, I like it when I code something and it doesn't work. The
computer language causes me to express my desires exactly, I must transcribe
them faithfully, and even then, sometimes I get it wrong. The feedback loop is
quick and honest.

Such is not the case in these matters.

------
Fede_V
I think the free market does an absolutely wonderful job of creating amazing
conditions for workers that are in high demand. For top tier programmers
(which are highly over-represented in this forum) working in tech hubs, you
can look forward to lots of work perks, smart managers, career progression,
and excellent pay.

Working long hours in an interesting job with a manager who supports you is
usually not that big a burden. Labour regulations aren't really designed for
this community. You have to take into account the people who lack the
education or aptitude to work a challenging job - and those people will be
ruthlessly crushed and exploited unless the government steps in and provides a
floor.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Explain stack ranking and PRP then

~~~
Fede_V
Those are pretty terrible (and I've heard that at least MS finally got rid of
stack ranking) but compared to the kind of shit that an employee at a fast
food chain has to go through, it's a blissful paradise.

Until they were shamed in the mainstream media, Starbucks used to treat
employees schedules as linear optimization problems without any regard for the
human beings behind them:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-
workers-scheduling-hours.html)

"""Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4;
report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5
a.m. on Sunday."""

~~~
texthompson
Couldn't Starbucks just add another optimization term that demands a minimum
amount of time off?

~~~
EliRivers
Yes, they could do, but then they might have to have another employee or some
other such that means they make a little less profit, so fuck the workers, if
they don't want the job there's some other sucker who'll thank me for the
chance to be exploited.

~~~
texthompson
That makes sense. I was thinking that this sounds more like a problem with
corporate culture, rather than a problem with optimization. If you have a
culture that doesn't value your workers, any effective optimization method
will lead to outcomes like this.

------
kristianp
There is no explanation in this article for what makes the 35 hour week bad,
except for weasel words like these: "And critics say the rule is a reason that
France’s unemployment rate is more than double Germany’s rate of 5 percent.".
The 35 hour rule has little to do with the difference between Germany's and
France's unemployment rates. This article is pretty frustrating, it's such a
hotchpotch of arguments.

Then the article goes on to talk about the underemployed, which is a separate
problem.

------
VieElm
> All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under
> the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for
> Economic Cooperation and Development.

For comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average for
Americans in non-farm employment work an average of 34.5 hours per week:

[http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm](http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm)

Which is way less than the amount worked by anyone I know or have ever worked
with in engineering and corporate jobs. I don't know if this number is so low
because of under-employed or part time labor, but I doubt it given the
breakdown over the various industries in that table on the bls.gove site.

~~~
Swizec
To an outsider, this is what the US workday looks like:

* 3 hours driving for no reason * 4 hours working * 6-7 hours fucking around pretending that you're being productive

I'm sure there's a lot of fucking around in French (and other European)
offices as well, but Americans seem particularly adept at spending long hours
at the office while actually working very little.

Source: every American I've questioned in depth about their workday. Mainly in
Silicon Valley, haven't had the chance to talk to too many others.

Source2: A recent-ish poll on HN where the "I actually work 2 hours a day"
option won

~~~
efa
That's the feedback I got from a German co-worker when I was working in
Silicon Valley. In Germany they just work 8 hours. But it's all heads down
working. In the US we screw around (talking, surfing the web, etc) much more.

But I know from experience that workers in Spain screw around A LOT as well
during the work day (and lord the long lunches at sit down restaurants!). So
all Europe is not the same.

~~~
nostromo
2012 German GDP per employee: $43,243

2012 American GDP per employee: $68,374

On paper at least, the US is much more efficient creating value from
employees.

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD)
(Both numbers are in constant 1990 PPP $)

~~~
pyrrhotech
a large part of American GDP is not based on employee productivity

~~~
dkokelley
Can you expand on this? Do you mean to say that much of American GDP comes
from things like natural resources where American employees have the fortune
of working to extract? What other factors besides employee productivity and
natural resources would contribute to GDP?

~~~
e12e
It's a little disingenuous to compare the US and Germany. While there are
large variations in Germany too (and one could look at the individual states
there as well) -- it would make more sense to compare US states, rather than
all of US. Or: one might compare the whole of EU (or possibly, some older
subset of EU) with all of the US.

[edit: On the other hand, as the US leads by a pretty significant margin,
there must be other factors at work. While Germany isn't top among the EU, the
US is top of the world on that list, anyway. I'm a little surprised the US is
even ahead of Norway -- given the pretty big GDP boost Norway gets from oil,
and our low population.]

~~~
vidarh
That table is purchasing power parity adjusted.

The unadjusted GDP for Norway in 2013 dollars is around $100k, and for the US
around $53k.

Purchasing power is depressed in Norway compared to the US primarily because
salary structure is one of the flattest in the world, which means salaries in
service jobs are amongst the highest in the world, and consequently prices are
amongst the highest in the world.

~~~
e12e
Ah, I clearly skimmed the summary too quickly. Just saw "adjusted" and assumed
index-adjusted to some year-dollar value. Thanks.

------
jedisct1
If you work in IT, 35h/week is something you will never see in France. You
will hardly see tech people leave the office before 8pm, 7pm at best. If you
leave before, people are going to point a finger at you "taking the afternoon
off".

Engineers typically have a "cadre" status meaning that they can work 10 hours
a day. That doesn't include remote work after getting back home.

When I moved to the US, what struck me is that work days are way shorter. Most
engineers were gone by 5:30pm. People actually have spare time after work.

Sure, there are less vacation days, but at the end of the day, the work-life
balance is way way way better in the US.

------
ricardobeat
How do we always end up back where we started? It's been shown over and over
that the majority of office jobs are not productive beyond 6 hours/day. Hiring
more people to "fill in the gaps" is a misunderstanding.

~~~
namdnay
The problem is that for office jobs in France, the 35h week never became the
7h day. It just became the same 40h week as before, except you get an extra 12
days holiday a year - so not necessarily more productive.

~~~
jedisct1
Or, in most companies, you don't get any extra day off at all, but you're
allowed to take two 15 min breaks per day. Which doesn't make a difference in
practice.

~~~
namdnay
I've never seen that for "cadres" \- it's always a day rate ("forfait jour").
Maybe it was for non-cadre office workers? Like call centers or something like
that?

~~~
jedisct1
That's for non-cadres.

------
squozzer
"in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees
across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with
productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a
welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law."

So then, what's all the hubbub? Why bother changing something that's obviously
ineffective?

~~~
timesizing
You're onto something there. The hubbub is all due to a kind of hobby of
English-speaking media (=their wealthy owners?) to whack France & its world
leadership in lowering the nationwide definition of "full time" amid
proliferating worksaving technology - God forbid we should switch from the
standard layoff response thus disempowering employees & weakening wages and
markets, to trimming hours across the board and maintaining employment and
wages and markets = no more complaints about "slow growth" = upsizing despite
constant downsizing. As for "ineffective," in 1997 the 35 hours was voted in
because official unemployment (UE) reached 12.6%. After the workweek went from
39 to 35 in the next four years, UE was down to 8.6% in 2001 before the US-led
recession hit France. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% UE cut. Isn't that what the USA got
1938-40? 44hr workweek in 1938, UE 19.0%; 42hrs in 1939, UE 17.2%; 40hrs in
1940, UE 14.6%. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% unemployment cut again. See Roediger &
Foner's history of the US workweek, Our Own Time. The objection to workweek
reduction is that it's effective, so it must be slandered energetically -
those who talk most about freedom are most scared of it, and financially
secure free time is the most basic freedom, without which the other freedoms
are either inaccessible or meaningless. Deets on timesizingdotcom.

------
transfire
What should "no longer be put on a pedestal" is Work. Work is not a virtue. It
is a necessary means to an end. When we go beyond that necessity we become
servants to the Economy, rather than having an economy that serves us.

------
jonawesomegreen
It has been my experience that the North American 40 hour work week is also a
myth in practice.

------
rzwitserloot
I don't really understand why this isn't more of a political thing. a 3 day
workweek seems like a total magic silver bullet to me that solves a tonne of
issues:

* Happiness index should go way up.

* The generation that is heading for retirement around now doesn't really know what to do with their time. If you actually work the full 40 hours a week, and you have a family, then, especially a few years ago, you simply didn't really need a hobby. You could zone out and watch some TV on saturday, work on the home on sunday, and monday is another workday. The problem is: these people end up miserable in their retirement because they don't know what to do with themselves. With only 24 hours of work a week, you WILL find a hobby.

* People spend more money when not working, and when money is being spent, the economy is much healthier.

* Convenience goes way up; with a 24 hour workweek, work is forced into moving away from a rigid work schedule: You can no longer declare that monday-friday, 9am-5pm are work times and all other times are off-work. That means that people are expected to not work during times which are still considered normal 'work hours'. This leads to expansion of work hours, thus, more convenience (things being open from 8am to 8pm or longer, monday to saturday). This is more relevant for europe; in the US, most things are already open a lot, many things even 24/7\. This also means that things that are usually only open on workdays, such as the DMV or a bank or a doctor's appointment can be visited by people without requiring awkward arrangements at work to make time.

* Unemployment is solved overnight, because you instantly multiply the job market by about 1.4 (okay, it's not that much, but more than enough to stave off unemployment for a long long time).

* It in fact moves the work market dynamic back to a seller's market, which is GREAT: Right now things like automated delivery trucks aren't advancing nearly as fast as it could simply because unemployment is already an issue and nobody wants to deal with thousands of unemployed truck drivers. Automation (which is something we should hopefully strive for; what satisfaction is there in doing a job a machine could easily do?) SHOULD be something we encourage; in practice, it isn't.

* Good for gender equality, in the sense that it is much simpler to share child raising duties if the normal workweek is just 24 hours. You can now have a real career without having your kid be raised by your spouse or a live-in nanny.

* Good for job mobility, because you now have far more time to think about what you wish to be doing, and more time to do research and even interview for jobs you are curious about. If people start moving towards jobs they like, the theory is that they'll be more productive in that job, so it's good for everybody and great for population happiness.

* Traffic jams are cleared instantaneously, and in general this moves work environments towards accepting that colleagues aren't either 'all present' or 'all gone', so even if traffic picks back up, workflows will adapt much faster to accepting that people arrive and leave in staggered fashion.

Sure, moving towards an actual 3-hour workweek, especially in a different way
vs. the move from 6 to 5 in the past (where EVERYONE got the same day off:
Saturday) is a long process, but it's so obviously worth doing!

~~~
icelancer
So... uh... how do you multiply the job market by a factor of 1.4x and expect
people to spend more money? Where is this surplus capital coming from?

There's a lot of weird assumptions with this post but that's a good duality to
start with, I guess.

~~~
rzwitserloot
You don't need surplus capital for more luxury.

I know, that sounds weird. I did not study economy in university, so apologies
if I'm covering well trodden ground or not using the right terminology, but,
reasoning it out:

Something like an excellent michelin-star level experience in a a restaurant
is some serious luxury and it shows: People pay through the nose for it. And
yet, you don't really need more capital (if that is the right word) to make
this a reality for far more people: You CAN have everyone work far less and
yet have far more people eat like this, simply because a very large part of
the resources required to make this dining experience happen, is manpower. I
know I said that unemployment is vastly reduced so you'd expect the costs of
this experience to go way up, given that i.e. the kitchen cleanup staff,
currently paid next to nothing, would become far more expensive, _BUT_, that
just means that in the short term this restaurant (A) has a much bigger % of
the total running costs dedicated to salary now, and (B) because everyone is
still spending a larger % of the fewer dollars they made, is richer and
looking to invest in the future.

Add to this the fact that society is busy embracing the idea that nobody
should work a minute longer than absolutely necessary, and no longer obsessed
with trying to ensure work exists for all able-bodied adults, and... robots!

I reread what I've written and it comes across as rather dramatic, but
efficient cleaning machines already exist, and a couple of high-caliber
restaurants already have them. They are just expensive, and in the current
climate, not worth it because you can get any sap working nights and overtime
for the change in your couch cushions right now. But not in this new model.
And _THAT_ is eventually how everyone works less and yet gets more luxury:
More efficiency.

Everywhere I look, I see rampant opportunities for orders of magnitude
improvements in efficiency, and yet at the same time a society and workforce
model that actively resists the change. We can automate deliveries easily,
but, there's resistance. Tesla and google auto-drive cars are being bound by
laws, some no doubt because of honest questions about their safety, but a lot
of them, I bet, due to some lobbying by various interested parties.
Manufacture of goods could be far more efficient, but there's simply no drive
to invest in any of it. Everyone drives a car, and yet even in places where
you could feasibly move to a society where almost nobody owns a car and all
you got is a very expansive public transit system and a couple of ZIP-car /
greenwheels / etc style locations... that change is not happening. It would be
more convenient for all and cost far less (i.e.: big society wins by way of
orders-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency), and it should be possible in
dense urban areas like Paris, the greater metropolitan triangle of Rotterdam-
The Hague-Amsterdam, London (which is probably the closest to the ideal due to
the congestion charge), etc.

Also, a lot of expensive hobbies exist, but there are even more cheap hobbies,
which provide just about as much happiness for far less cost. The internet
leads the way in this: The very act of writing this response is effectively a
hobby, and it costs basically nothing.

~~~
maigret
> Something like an excellent michelin-star level experience in a a restaurant
> is some serious luxury and it shows: People pay through the nose for it.

Because it's rare and cannot be copied that easily. A lot of special talent is
needed for this. Not only in cooking, but also in perfect management.

What you are describing in this post is usually driven by growth, especially
productivity improvement. This happens continously accross the world, but at a
"limited" pace, not 1.4. So things like 35 hours produce suddenly a bump that
may be hard to digest, especially for company owners. Efficiency improvement
means new market, means investment opportunities, so whatever is possible will
be done.

Car sharing is another thing... People like to own cars. This is cultural, not
economics, so just changing a policy won't change it. The question is rather
what would be more appealing than a car? Currently mobile devices and
computers seem to take over that role, but let's see how it develops.

------
Spooky23
My wife had a 35 hour job. It basically meant that most people took a 1 hour
lunch. Other than less fibbing about 30 minute lunches, didn't have a huge
impact based in any other gig she had.

My employer allows up to flex days per two week pay period. I don't do it, but
it seems to work well -- people tend to come in early and get shit done, and
if they need to work on an off day, they can accrue some limited time in
compensation.

There's always a few workaholics, but the place is very productive with
minimal drama around death march work conditions.

------
PaulRobinson
1\. Introduce 35-hour week rule

2\. Allow multiple ways to get around that rule by employers

3\. Employers offer zero-hour contracts or don't offer full 35-hour contracts
at least

4\. Some employees end up working 60 hours/week to make up the difference,
therefore not getting the advantages the law was intended to create

5\. Note that on average people are working 39 hours/week, not 35, and only
slightly behind the 40.9 hours/week average for the rest of the Eurozone

6\. Insist all of this is stopping companies investing in France because
somehow this makes French people look "lazy"

7\. Backtrack and insist the 35-hour rule will remain in place

This a law that doesn't work, nobody follows, is bad for the image of France
but in fact workers are 13% more productive than the rest of the EU, is
threatened with being removed, but will be saved because the lawmakers think
it does work and is being followed and isn't bad for the image of France?

Right. And this is the country of the deep thinkers and intellectuals? Uhh
huh...

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
But its the non french international firms that get raided :-)

------
toddkazakov
There is big problem with the employment in France. I spent almost a year
there and this is a country where I am not going back.

I worked as an engineer in big enterprise at 35 hours a week + RTTs - meaning
I am working 37.5 hours but I can take more days off. Everything sounded great
before I went there and realized there is double standard - employees vs.
contractors. If you are a contractor you have no rights and you are expected
to work as much as your manager says. In the end I was spending more than
50-55 hours a week and the overtime I did was not paid accordingly. If I
wasn't OK with this I'd be let go easily and there are no laws that protect
me. I would not be fired, but I will be transferred back to the contracting
company who is not obliged to pay me, if I am not working for a client.

~~~
nraynaud
> I will be transferred back to the contracting company who is not obliged to
> pay me, if I am not working for a client.

this is highly suspicious. In France services companies, people are paid in
between contracts.

~~~
namdnay
The ONLY case where this would be possible is if the OP was self-employed,
using a contracting company to get a position with a client ("portage
salarial") - In which case they are not employees and hence aren't really in a
position to criticise employment practices.

~~~
nraynaud
nope, there are some cases of "interim" too in IT.

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vegancap
35 hours? I think I've done that in 2 days!

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finalight
let's face it, and deal with it

in my country, 44 hours a week is average

sometimes, we might even reach 50/60 hours

~~~
e12e
Which country is this? How many work(non-vacation) weeks a year?

~~~
finalight
singapore

usually monday to friday but 5.5 working days for some other companies
(referring to white collar job btw)

so if you just assume it's 5 day week, then it would be 25 working days
approximately a month, times 12 would be 300

this year we have 10 public holidays and that's again under assumption that
these holidays falls on non weekend (if fall on saturday, it's considered as
gone)

so 300 - 10 = 290

so ya, that's about that

~~~
yitchelle
Working long hours in Singapore is a mindset problem. When I was working there
in 2005, it is the norm that the project managers would schedule at 6pm in the
evening with the local teams.

