Of course French employees will still answer email after 6PM.

Most western european countries get a lot of flak for policies which amount to "Employers have to treat their employees responsibly".

Employers hired a person, not a robot. People have private lives, get sick, have relatives who get sick, have children, need vacations. Those problems become the problems of an employer when they hire someone.

The government has a role in describing the norms and minimum requirements of this relationship. Most of these rules don't affect most working professionals, because they already work for employers who are responsible.

There's some large companies in Germany that stopped delivering emails to most employees after 8 in the evening. All emails will get delivered in the morning. People that might receive alerts or important stuff are exempt, but the general employee is not.

I think that's a reasonable approach - receiving work-related email in the evening keeps your mind on the work-problems and I do think people just need some downtime to relax.

To throw into the discussion, France chronically has a very high depression rate [0]. I don't have the exact numbers but there is correlation with high income, and generally speaking work related mental illness are not uncommon.

The image of French people as lazy asses is about a half of the population perhaps. The other half[1] is in a different boat altogether.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-26/france-u-s-have-hig... [1] wild guess

"Trade Unions representing workers in the technical and digital sectors have won a legally-binding agreement prohibiting employees from contacting staff after work."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2601526/Turn-BlackBe...

I guess those who would prefer the Daily Mail not to exist in its present form will enjoy rebutting this 'alleged news'.

As someone who works with many French and Danish colleagues... If they didn't respond after 6pm ever, the turnaround for anything involving the west coast of the United States would be ridiculous. There would be no chance for any real-time communication.

For example, I wake up, see email at 8:30am asking me to do something. Not all information is provided, so I fire an email back at 9am/6pm in France. Oops, too late. They don't respond til 10am their time, which happens to be 1am here, and I already fell asleep.

Oh come now, I worked for several companies in my life and always included regular breaks and lunch in my 8h work schedule. Never seen anyone not doing so. I live and work in Poland.

Why do we even care about France? Why does it make so much more noise than the UK and Germany, where tech is really flourishing? France has been in gentle decline since Napoleon. It hasn't won a war in 200 years. It has given up much of its power as a nation state to Brussels and Berlin. Its citizens are luddites and its elite have created an economy that crushes young people. I speak as someone who lived there for many years. France talks big, but little happens there.

I've never kept office hours as long as 9am to 7.30pm. Too long in one location turns you into a monkey banging away random crap on a keyboard.

Starting at 9 and ending at 7? I take it the average French employee doesn't have children. Those hours mean that you'll rarely ever see them. At least during the work week.