
35h work week fading as the average full-time work week in France nears 40h - waxzce
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/07/30/35-hour-work-week-fading-as-the-average-full-time-work-week-in-france-nears-40-hrs/
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harrytuttle
I do a 35 hour week religiously. I do not get paid for overtime, therefore I
do not do overtime.

We're not here to prop up these businesses with poor efficiency and
mismanagement; we're there to get paid for our time.

The more people who bend on this, the worse it will get, resulting in an
Americanesque slavery system where 80 hours a week and a 3 hour commute every
day is considered acceptable.

~~~
babarock
I never counted the hours I spend at my job. Not once. Lucky for me, probably,
neither does my employer. I'm paid to get the job done, not to show my face at
the office for a certain amount of time per week.

Some weeks are more intense than others. It happens, so what? I'll put in the
extra effort, and get the job done. It helps staying motivated when the bosses
are putting in the extra hours with you.

The opposite of what you call "Americanesque slavery system" is this, oh-so-
common system in France, where people have no passion for their job, care only
about the salary and picture quality time only "outside" of work.

I spend too much time working to not care. If my job wasn't fulfilling I
wouldn't be doing it.

 _Disclaimer: I 'm in my twenties with no family to feed, no financial debt
and generally very little financial responsibilities. I don't know how long I
can afford demanding having an interesting job._

~~~
conradfr
Unpaid overtime when you're doing it willingly is not wrong per se. I've done
it and will do it again. When work is interesting it does not really feel like
work, does it ? :)

As a developer I would love flexible schedule, getting the job done when it's
need to be done etc. But what I generally find in France is poor and
inflexible management culture. I don't call "unpaid overtime because of poor
planning but still come everyday at 9:00 thanks" flexible.

And I hate how in certain industry it is said to be "expected" or "normal". I
have high (non-CS) skilled friends who do long unpaid hours and if you divide
their earnings by the hours they do, they effectively get minimum wage.
Getting a burn out or depression from minimum wage, that's not a great deal.

~~~
coldtea
> _Unpaid overtime when you 're doing it willingly is not wrong per se._

Not wrong, but unprofessional.

It poisons the well for the people not willing to do it, and it gives the
picture (to your employer) that you are a sucker eager to be exploited, and
your time is worth nothing.

And when layoffs time come, he could not care less if you did "unpaid
overtime" to save some project on death march.

------
fab13n
This law allowed very positive changes, even if they aren't the officially
intended ones. In exchange for a 10% work time reduction, largely compensated
by years of near-zero salary rises, it lead unions to accept a lot of
flexibility improvements, which are usually impossible to get through in
France.

(there's as much flexibility as anywhere else in France, but very poorly
distributed: indeterminate work contracts are ridiculously stable, and
everyone else is exceedingly precarious)

As for the 35h week, most professionals such as engineers never wanted it nor
got it. Instead, we keep contracts in fixed number of days per year, rather
than hours per week, and we get an extra 10 days or so of paid vacations
called "RTT". Extra vacations are more affordable in France than in many other
countries: being a very touristic place, French people spend a lot of their
vacation time in France, hence a lot of their vacation money back into French
economy.

~~~
fab13n
> being in a very touristic place, French people spend a lot of their vacation
> time in France.

Also, many companies mandate that RTT days are taken regularly (to avoid
having the company effectively closed for the whole summer, as well as half of
december), which means no more than one or two days at once. This means many
short vacations rather than few long ones, also improving the incentive to
spend locally.

------
jib
What kind of weird thinking is that? "(ie outside of vacations, holidays and
RTT days)."

RTT days are specifically extra days off to get you down to 35hours/week.
Hours/year would be a useful metric - hours / week, but filtering out weeks
you have your time off isn't, unless you are somehow trying to argue that
French working hours aren't sweet.

I worked in a few different positions in France, I saw different contracts
like 35h week, no RTT, 38h week,12RTT, 40h week, 24RTT.

Arguing that the working week is longer for the guys who were working
40h/week, but had 49 days / year off (25 days of vacation + 24 RTTs) seems
like using a metric intended to push an agenda. Someone on that schedule could
literally take 1 day off every day of the week, should they so wish (if you
include the bank holidays, which would amount to another 10 days or so / year,
depending on how they fall).

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nolok
I don't know about industrial jobs, but everyone I know in IT, in marketing,
... Never really worked 35h, instead my contract says 39h (35h + 4h overtime)
- for reference the worktime before 35h was 40h. And people who work even
longer hours, have more overtime hours. What the law changed is not how long
you can work, but where the overtime hours threshold is.

This article, which claims the 35h worktime is fading, obviously doesn't know
what it talks about, it has never been the norm in the "real world", outside
of some specific areas such as public jobs. Which probably why they don't have
any graph to show the actual worked hours change over the years, as that would
go against what they claim.

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lrem
From my observation the work time is getting longer mainly because of influx
of people desperate enough to do unpaid overtime. My wife's management is
doing 7hrs/day. She's feeling quite insecure, so she's doing 9hrs/day, still
being paid for the 7.

~~~
coldtea
Companies will take advantage of EVERY available way available to them to have
employess work more for less pay.

If modern Western companies were allowed to use slavery or child labour, they
would jump at the chance. It's a "competitive advantage", after all.

That's what they do when they outsource to the third world anyway, take
advantage of people in need to exploit them more than what a "westerner" would
tolerate -- including children, and, in some cases, including beating them or
even killing them if they attempt to demand better conditions (see Coca Cola
in Latin America, Shell in Nigeria, etc).

Just as they did in the West during the 19th century, early 20th century etc
-- it's not that they changed their mind, it's just that labour laws now
prevent them.

~~~
icebraining
It should be noted that many of those labor laws were pushed by
industrialists. For example, the two Robert Peel (father and son) were wealthy
industrialists which passed (as MPs) various acts setting minimum age and
maximum working hours for children.

~~~
kaybe
That way, they cannot be forced by their competition to do things they don't
want because it offers a comparative advantage. It makes sense.

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mhd
If you check the European statistics, you'll find that most countries pretty
much have the same working hours per week, with the UK being a notable
exception (but only by one or two hours, we're not talking US/Korean levels).

Edit: Checked my source again, and it seems that hours in the UK are going
down, and anyways, the big "leader" is Iceland. Although, given their
population size, those statistics might be skewed by one guy who's _really_
pulling some overtime.

[http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init...](http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=tps00071&plugin=0)

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gadders
Just as an anecdote, I have a team that is split London/Paris and I've not
noticed any appreciable difference in hours worked between the two locations.

------
sotirisk
I'm from Greece. We have 40h work weeks since the first of May 1892. Overtime
pay is a joke for any Greek worker. We are expected to work overtime until all
daily tasks are completed and then leave. Seriously people who live in
countries with 35h work weeks and overtime payments have it really easy.

~~~
claudius
It’s not only about how long you work but also about how much work you get
done in that time.

Though I guess that this specifically is a case of not feeding trolls.

------
zamzamzom
This article seems biased, it states the normal french work week is close to
40h outside of RTT. What are RTT or Réduction du temps de Travail ? Additional
days off you can take whenever corresponding to the time over 35h/week you
worked.

In other words it is expected to find that a regular work week "outside of
RTT" to be close to 40h, and closer to 35h taking RTT into account.

Now RTT is one mechanism that was put there to work around employers who
didn't want to play along with the 35h week, as in have employees work less so
you can hire a an additional employee.

It is usually understood that employers didn't want play along from the get
go, some even abused this to turn to permanent temporary workers thus
increasing unemployment rate.

Unemployment rate in France actually comes with a PR catch, the numbers
reported usually are for category A of people registered as looking for a job
which is only one of 5 categories ranging from A to B [1] which changed from
earlier categories ranging from 1 to 5 till 1995 then went to 8 differents
categories from 1995 to 2008 [2].

[1]: [http://vosdroits.service-
public.fr/F13240.xhtml](http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/F13240.xhtml) [2]:
[http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions...](http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions/categor-
demandes-emploi-anpe.htm)

------
culshaw
I've been working regular 40hr weeks since I first started in the
advertising/design industry, as a developer. I don't get paid for overtime yet
am expected to work overtime where necessary. It is normal in this industry
but it's not considered right. If I get the job done in a shorter amount of
time then they'll find another job for me to do, if it takes me too long, then
I have to work late. There is no 'leave early' clause.

------
shin_lao
I'm sorry but we have too many vacations and it's hurting business. Very often
we can't reach a person because he's off and the proxy has no clue. This is
very true at big corp. We wasted a lot of time that way.

Employees may have trouble to take all their vacations (around 32 days a year
+ holidays) and this increases costs greatly, because sorry, but it's always
more efficient to keep the head count as low as possible.

Last but not least, this affected salaries negatively. What we were forced to
give as vacations we didn't give as salary (although we try to be as generous
as possible).

edit: It seems unclear when I talk about "we can't reach a person" that I'm
talking about our customers/vendors who have people sometimes away for a whole
month (generally May).

~~~
fab13n
> [Inefficiencies] This is very true at big corp.

Among inefficiencies in a big corp., vacation times are a _very_ secondary
issue. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you're spending
more than 5% of your work time goofing on Internet, including commenting on
Hacker News. 5% is what RTT typically represent (~10 days a year out of 200).

Then there's poor management, poor execution, poor motivation, lack of
vision... If you can't get reach anyone, it's a matter of poor planning and
poor skills redundancy, not a matter with the amount of vacations.

> Last but not least, this affected salaries negatively.

Most people would derive more marginal gain, in terms of happiness, from extra
time than from extra money. Would you want to become Warren Buffet, with his
wealth and his age? Probably not, because he's so much poorer in time (life
expectancy) than you that no amount of money can make up for it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Then there 's poor management, poor execution, poor motivation, lack of
vision... If you can't get reach anyone, it's a matter of poor planning and
poor skills redundancy, not a matter with the amount of vacations._

Or maybe your company just isn't big enough to have 2 people capable of doing
every single task.

As for your "only 5% of time" theory, you miss the point. It's not just 5% of
time, it's delays. If I'm spending 5% of my day on /r/aww and someone comes to
my desk needing something for their project, they get what they need. If I'm
spending 5% of my days gone, they are spending 5% of their time waiting for
me.

~~~
king_jester
> Or maybe your company just isn't big enough to have 2 people capable of
> doing every single task.

And how exactly is that any individual employees problem? Companies employ
management structures supposedly to handle this kind of situation, so that a
company can't is their own fault. Further, individual employees ability to
take vacation time and to be away from the company is more important than the
company's business needs.

------
gmac
The UK's New Economics Foundation have an interesting report for anyone
interested in this topic:
[http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours](http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours)

------
thehme
This article is pretty interesting because I was not aware there was some
notion of French being lazy at all. In fact, as the author mentions, the fact
that stats show that French work longer then they should, is definitely an
indication of their wanting to work hard. Hopefully overworking is not
negatively affecting other areas of their lives. I think that underdeveloped
countries will always have overworked people willing to overwork (perhaps
underpaid too), but developed countries give people the opportunity to work
what they are paid for and step up to the occasion when needed - not
forcefully, but because you want to and you can.

------
g4ur4v
In India we have 45 hour week "on paper" and tend to extend 50 hours a week on
average. 40 hours a week is no big deal here in India.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If you pay them, Indians will work hard and get things done. My last startup
used a lot of Indian labor. My next one probably will too, once it reaches the
point of needing it.

Can't see any reason I'd try to hire labor in France. Sounds expensive and
painful.

~~~
g4ur4v
Talking about hard work, a lot of people in India have this perception that
working for long hours is working hard and many times they end up working long
hours with very less productivity.In IT companies in India , it has become
more of a working culture to work for long hours and no one seems to have any
problem with it.

