I do a 35 hour week religiously. I do not get paid for overtime, therefore I do not do overtime.<p>We're not here to prop up these businesses with poor efficiency and mismanagement; we're there to get paid for our time.<p>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.
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.<p>(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)<p>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.
What kind of weird thinking is that? "(ie outside of vacations, holidays and RTT days)."<p>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.<p>I worked in a few different positions in France, I saw different contracts like 35h week, no RTT, 38h week,12RTT, 40h week, 24RTT.<p>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).
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.<p>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.
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.
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).<p>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 <i>really</i> pulling some overtime.<p><a href="http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=tps00071&plugin=0" rel="nofollow">http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init...</a>
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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].<p>[1]: <a href="http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/F13240.xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/F13240.xhtml</a>
[2]: <a href="http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions/categor-demandes-emploi-anpe.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions...</a>
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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).
The UK's New Economics Foundation have an interesting report for anyone interested in this topic: <a href="http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours" rel="nofollow">http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours</a>
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.