35h work week fading as the average full-time work week in France nears 40h
rudebaguette.com
rudebaguette.com
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.
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.
I think that's better than the situation we have in America, where employees are expected to have passion for their job but employers are not expected to have any passion for their employees.
I'm lucky. I very much enjoy and feel passionate about my job. But I resent the assertion that I ought to feel that way. My employer wouldn't hesitate to lay me off if some consultant said it would improve the bottom line, and I won't hesitate to jump ship if I get a better offer somewhere else. I owe my employer a good faith effort. I choose to go above and beyond that only because it serves my purposes.
The thing is that I do have a passion for my job, but I want to keep that passion, not let it burn me out and then resent it for the rest of my life. I pace myself rather than burn out.
Disclaimer: I'm in my thirties with 4 other people and a dog to feed and have a hefty mortgage to pay off as well, yet I work less time than people without that responsibilty
The people who don't "get" family are doing those who do "get" family a big disservice.
The problem is that they most likely will have family one day so they're only burying themselves too with this attitude.
And capitalism is as you say, waiting to milk them.
I'd wager a higher proportion of people in the US feel this way about their job than in France.
At least a dead end job in France gives you reasonable work hours and plenty of holiday.
Ever been to France? Or talked to French working people?
For that matter, ever talked to US office drones?
>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.
So, basically "I'm under thirty that happens to have an interesting job and no family, and I have no idea how my experience relates to the rest of the working population out there, but I'm going extrapolate anyway".
I have seen this argument many times in discussion forums, so I have to ask: Do you have a defined amount of work to do? Where I work, there is always something more to do. If nothing else, then code improvements, adding tests, improving internal systems or less important features. In fact, an important part of my job is deciding what I should do next.
Instead of defining 'the job' in terms of the end result, you could think of it as 'your time'. Fundamentally the company is telling you, as the 80 hr/week crunchtime worker and 25 hr/week downtime worker, that you're only worth to them what it is you output. That's fine, but I'm a software engineer too, and I like my time being valued by the hour. I get no share of the enormous profits what I help make might earn, so if I work double the hours one week to delight a client, I expect to be paid for every hour (and 'time and a half' pay) for doing that, seeing that as a good chance for me to bill more hours. I saw no logic in this as a salaried worker, because if I worked 90 hours one week, it was never possible to expect the next 6 working days off (and even if it were, if I weren't in the mood for vacation that would not have interested me anyway). Granted, I also pay for my own healthcare and everything else, but I enjoy that too. I see myself as my own product, selling it to my client by the hour, and doing what I want when I want.
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.
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.
If it is occasional, I think it is fine. If OTOH it is a regular occurrence that an employer depends upon, and others who are less willing to join in are compelled to stay because an expectation has been cultivated, that is wrong.
I don't get paid for my time, I get paid for the value I bring to my company.
What's galling (pardon the pun) is the arrogance that's often on display towards any company or country that has the temerity to question the wisdom of these rules:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732354920457831...
PG himself has posted this little graphic that illustrates quite nicely where the European economy is heading, no doubt in part because of these attitudes:
http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/29...
Yours is a pretty corporate-centric view of things and doesn't include mergers, manufacturing moving to the East, outsourcing and the rampant globalisation since the 1950's when communications and travel became considerably less tiresome...
Most businesses by employee volume are SME's. Large businesses don't just suddenly appear. They grow over time.
Being an American, the only people I've known who have had to work more than one job was because their first employer wouldn't give them enough hours because of the type of regulations and "work rules" you are championing.
>Yours is a pretty corporate-centric view of things and doesn't include mergers, manufacturing moving to the East, outsourcing and the rampant globalisation since the 1950's when communications and travel became considerably less tiresome...
I would view it as reality-centric. It's supply and demand. It turns out Western peoples aren't the only ones who can perform sophisticated labor in exchange for payment. People in the East have every right to participate in the global economy. Your original comment stated: "we're there to get paid for our time". You're wrong - it's not kindergarten. You're paid in exchange for the value you bring to your employer.
>Most businesses by employee volume are SME's. Large businesses don't just suddenly appear. They grow over time.
That's the point of the chart. They aren't suddenly appearing (successful startups) or growing over time. From what I've heard, many of the legacy Euro-corps (Airbus for example) have a pretty incestuous relationship with the government. All told, it doesn't sound like a very healthy business ecosystem.
It is very rare I work less than 42 hours in any given week, though I don't religiously keep count of it all, but likewise if I need a few hours off here or there (for a dental appointment, family issue, or what-ever else) it "just happens" - my flexibility is appreciated and offered back when I need it, which I consider rather civilised. Occasionally there are crunch times when a lot of overtime is needed, which we don;t pay for overtime (I keep hinting!) time-off-in-lieu is arranged and there is usually no pressure if you simply can't do the extra due to personal commitments.
Working a fixed number of hours to the minute and watching the clock, while stable, doesn't strike me as a "human" way of running things. There was a time when there was a definite flexibility mis-balance and I "worked to rule" for a time to prove a point, but that was resolved quickly at that point. Of course I don't work for a massive company - I imagine the effort of policing more flexible conditions in order to make sure no one is taking the piss at the expense of others would be much more difficult for a multi-national.
Do you ever think that benefits assigned by politicians, people who do not work in the real world, somehow come without a cost? Do you understand that the large youth unemployment many countries face is because of such policies you applaud? You cannot legislate paradise, you have to earn it.
35 or 40 hours is really irrelevant, unless you are the employee.
The problem comes down to the fact that most humans are rubbish at what they do or don't care, businesses look at short term cash flow rather than long term investment or the business isn't viable to start with. The typical failure scenarios are:
1. They hire the cheapest people who will do the work then whinge when they have to hire two people to cover that time because the first person is inefficient, incompetent or disinterested in it.
2. They hire humans rather than make a long term investment in automation or subcontracting services out.
3. The business isn't really viable. So costs are cut and the business scrapes along.
Do you understand that the large youth unemployment many countries face is because of such policies you applaud?
The large youth unemployment is due purely due to the fact that the governments support people who don't aim to work in society. They are not employable, apart from by businesses described in case (1) above at which point they self-perpetuate the failure mode.
Businesses need to stop blaming everyone else for their own failings and start looking in the mirror. If a business is failing, then it's mismanaged, isn't hiring the right people or is not viable. Not all businesses can be successful.
For ref, I've built and sold three SME businesses. I now work for another one as a major stakeholder.
To add to this. I'd point out that the tendency to distill low-level jobs down to tedium and rote drudgery is IMO an unfortunate mistake. Some think it is clever because it means they can stick any warm body off the street into a job and have them up and running in a short time. The managers in these places can never resist the temptation to hold this fact over their employees' heads. Only the desperate, the stupid, and the woefully uneducated can tolerate such work for any length of time.
Anyone who knows better than me care to comment?
And the way the 35 hours law was applied to cadres is that your contract have a "forfait annuel", meaning you have to work a number of days per year but without any limitation at all in the number of hours per week or days [1]. It also mean you generally can't be paid overtime at all because there is no time limit(except if you work on Sundays maybe).
In a previous position, I remember that my contract specified that I had to work 219 days per year, the rest being holidays or RTT. But usually you can work 50, 60, etc hours per full time week. So it does not really feel like you are at 35 hours per week.
219 days is about 44 weeks.
44 weeks * 50 hours / 47 = 46 hours per week on average + 5 week of paid leave.
From my knowledge, this is far more generous that what American companies are offering to their employee, but this is far cry from effectively working 35 hours per week.
[1] European law specify that you can't work more than 48 hours per week (with exceptions for executives, etc) and have a minimum rest time between 2 days of 11 hours, but this is rarely enforced in enterprises.
The legal number of hours per week is still 35 (or more + RTT days) but the time you do over the legal number is counted as "overtime" only if your manager requests that you work more and that is very rare.
In many companies the real work time is much higher but I can't give you a realistic global value.
But I have to say, if I didn't get paid for my time, I'd be heading out the door the second that I was no longer being paid. If that means watching the clock, so be it. My time is worth something to me. Maybe yours isn't.
I probably work on average an hour or two a week above my contracted hours (depends how you count stuff like handling a few urgent things from home etc), but I see it as a loose agreement - I get a pile of cash each month in return for generating as much value as I can in roughly 40h/week.
Sometimes that means that I work 18h in a row (rollout of a new product for instance) and sometimes it means I leave early on a slow day.
While the agreement says in pretty black and white that I work 9-18 Mon-Fri (I think - it was a long time since I read it), neither side is trying to encode the agreement fully, nor follow it to the letter, because doing so would be detrimental to both of us.
Whenever a company mentioned long hours (even well paid ones), I immediately stopped interviewing for them. That kind of life isn't worth the money.
(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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It's just the fear of failure (in a country that will probably fail soon). I hear the word "crisis" way too often, even though it still seems to be a seller's market for techies. Companies all around me are expanding like crazy, while the (especially junior) workers seem to really fear unemployment.
Here in the US, I've known many people who do not work in the tech industry that have experienced this kind of management pressure. Management doesn't explicitly state you will lose your job for not working more, but threats or implied loss of status, salary, or having your work transferred to someone else makes you very paranoid about losing your job. For some kinds of industries and services, this is a big deal because hiring is not nearly as fast or plentiful as it is in tech right n ow.
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...
Though I guess that this specifically is a case of not feeding trolls.
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 [2]: http://www.insee.fr/fr/methodes/default.asp?page=definitions...
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).
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.
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.
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.
If you have that problem, then your management and the way the company is run is BS.
It's not about persons not being there a mere few hours less per week.
The problem is not being there few hours less per week but being in vacations a lot. For example the whole month of May is a pure write off every year.
Your theory about my management being disorganized is very naive. Have you ever run a company? However well organized you might be at some point you have to interface with the outside world which is pure chaos.
What's there to re-read? What I said is you shouldn't build your business so that a customer issue depends on ONE person.
It's not about the persons "being in vacations a lot" problem (also: define a lot), and it's not about the customer having an issue.
It's about your company being structured that way that a guy missing can result in nobody else being able to fill in for him.
That's a really bad argument. If the proxy has no clue, that means your company depends on individuals, and is screwed if one quits or gets hit by a bus? You have more to worry about than the amount of vacation.
I've actually seen the contrary, forced vacation being beneficial to the company because it forces a bottleneck individual to ensure his projects and the company can still run without him.
This is your own damn fault. Fix your business.
Can't see any reason I'd try to hire labor in France. Sounds expensive and painful.