Posted on 04/17/2008 8:26:02 PM PDT by blam
'French take most holidays in the world'
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 3:25am BST 18/04/2008
The scale of President Nicolas Sarkozy's challenge to "get France back to work" was underlined yesterday by a poll crowning the French world champions for the amount of annual holiday they take.
The average working Frenchman spends 37 days en vacances, with Italy in second place on 33 days, according to Harris Interactive, the American polling institute.
Britain trails with 26 days holiday per year - a rise of two days in two years.
America comes last (or first depending on one's view) with just two weeks off.
Not only are the French given a record number of holidays, they beat most other countries in making sure they take them all - much to the chagrin of Mr Sarkozy, who won last year's presidential election with the slogan "work more to earn more".
While almost half of Italians declared that they would be prepared to work more, 80 per cent of the French were not prepared to do so.
According to Robert Rochefort, the director of Crédoc, the living conditions watchdog, the major reason for this record figure has been the introduction of the 35-hour week, which Mr Sarkozy is trying to dilute.
People who work too many hours are given compensatory days off, known as réduction du temps de travail.
May is a French employer's nightmare due to the number of national holidays it contains, many of which fall on a Monday or Friday.
Such long weekends are known as ponts (bridges). It is a national sport in France to extend such ponts for as many days as possible.
do they have the happiest lives in the world
And they havw a 35-hour work week, I understand.
It’s amazing France is still around.
The ones fortunate to have full-time jobs are real happy.
Trouble is you have to wait in line for a few decades before one of those jobs opens up.
That’s why their best and brightest youngsters want out.
This is news? I seem to remember reading that they were on holiday from 1939 to 1945.
Beeber stuning gnus.
Is everybody forgetting the roughly 8 days a month or so - every month - of weekend time?
And miss the annual "Burning Cars" festival?
Other than body odor and surrenderitis, French are pretty cool!
Far more Frenchmen died in those years than did either British or Americans.
Some holiday indeed.
France has been an ally of the United States for 220 years. They are among the handful of nations that are currently supporting us materially and with troops in the WOT.
I'm sure you do not mean them any disrespect.
Wouldn't it be easier to extend if it falls on Tuesday or Thursday?
We had 400,000 military deaths in WWII, how many did the French have? And on whose side did they occur?
About 550,000 more or less. Not all military, 90,000 Jews, quite a few French civilians.
You’re counting the jews and gypsies which the French helped ship off to Nazi death camps as French casualties? That’s an interesting take on the situation. When you pull out those casualties, along with civilian deaths, what do their military casualties total? Isn’t that number about half the number of deaths our military suffered - not to mention the deaths suffered by the British military.
Every April 30th I honor the men of Camerone with a drink, or two.
I'll leave the moral bean-counting to you. Have a nice day!
Har!! Equating defending your home-land with betraying/exterminating your Jewish neighbor is truly absurd.
Way to run from that moral gymnastics. How proto-typically French of you.
I'm not sure how much they're actually doing with their current support, but I do recall that one time, back in 1986, when they wouldn't let our bombers fly over French airspace, on the way to Libya.
At this point in time we find ourselves sharing a number of interests with the French.
“I’m not sure how much they’re actually doing with their current support, but I do recall that one time, back in 1986, when they wouldn’t let our bombers fly over French airspace, on the way to Libya. “
France refused to be accomplice of this bombing because the government at this time thought that the risk of collateral damages was too high and that the motivations were unclear.
The result was that the target was not hit, a kid was killed and 20 years after Khadaffi is back among our “friends”.
I am always very critrical towards the French...but for this Tripoli Bombing of 1986 we can’t deny that they were right!
That does not change the fact that the europeans, specially the French, have a much higher productivity rate per hour worked than the US...and their economy is not in worse shape than ours. Specially theses days.
There may be lessons to get from this.
We should stop thinking that working 15 hours a day for a slave salary makes a nation greater.
Simply not true according to the Conference Board in 2007 productivity.
And most of the gain is attributed to the strong Euro versus the dollar. The dollar strengthens and the gap widens. I was in China recently with a Frenchman and the issue of the 35-hour work week came up and the Chinese asked why the French would only want to work two days a week? That's a better lesson to learn.
35 hours a week may not be a lot,...but it’s not 2 days!.
I am not sure that in China they are well aware of the rest of the world economical aspects. You should not rely so much on Chinese people to make your judgement.
Anyway, your table about productivity is interesting and well detailed, but it’s about the Labor Productivity GROWTH (in percent).
Funny, your reaction was the same as the Frenchman’s I was with, except he saw how hard the Chinese were working.
You, of course, would be wrong about China’s awareness of global economics. And I suppose I must retort that you should not rely so much on French myths that French labor productivity is so much higher than America’s. The French GDP per capita is 72% of the US number and labor productivity is about the same, so the French are working 28% less than Americans.
Sorry, mon vieux, labor productivity growth was included in the tables I provided (second tab on the spreadsheet).
US labor productivity growth in 2006 1%; 2007 1.1%
France in 2006 0.9% and in 2007 0.6%.
I was refering more to this:
http://www.ilo.org/global/About_the_ILO/Media_and_public_information/Press_releases/lang—en/WCMS_083976/index.htm
However, Americans work more hours per year than workers in most other developed economies. This is why, measured as value added per hour worked, Norway has the highest labour productivity level (US$ 37.99), followed by the United States (US$ 35.63) and France (US$ 35.08).
Which actulally shows that the US has a higher labour productivity than France
Yes that is consistent with the data I provided (Tab 5)but I fail to understand how it is consistent with your earlier comment that France has a much higher productivity rate per hour than the US. If you work 28% less and produce 28% less, it doesn’t make you more productive.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.