Walkinaround's information about work in France seems to be very out of date. It seems to date from about 1980. That's always the problem with "someone told me that..." and "I read that..."

It surprises me that you somehow left out the mass protests of the last years against precarité. Your work situation was typical for a certain age group. The reality now is short term contracts and Gig platforms.

As an American, I want to say that I have nothing but respect for the protesters and strikers. To protest every week for a year! To strike in solidarity with your fellow countrymen! Americans would do well to have that sort of empathy for others. Alas, we will all be living in the streets eating from garbage cans before we wake up. And then it will be too late.

France has one of the lowest poverty percentages in Europe and it continues to go down. So a lot of the protests last year were about the fear of precarity, not precarity itself. People feel insecure right now in a lot of the countries of the world.

The original yellow vest movement was to protest the ecology tax on fuel. Which was cancelled, unfortunately. So, no, I never understood it. However, then they decided "let's protest every single thing that passes through our minds." Speed limits, government policies, laws, immigrants, taxes, pesticides, you name it, the yellow vests were against it. They also demanded that referendums be held about absolutely everything. And they were against the fact that elected officials were carrying out the policies for which people had voted. Is all of this admirable?

Absolutely agree. Have you followed last week's (and month's) farmer protests? We had the army in the streets. Here too, constant agitation.

Not at all! I have a friend who is there now and posting on Facebook. Transportation is a bit difficult, but everything is open and beautifully decorated for the holidays, and he's having a wonderful time.

I've worked very closely with French teams for about 20 years.* As part of that, i've lived in Paris for about 5 years in total, off and on.

I love France and the French people. Am I an expert?* No, certainly not.* But I know enough to call BS on any view that french people work 35 hours per week and have 8 weeks vacation.* Yeah that's what the paper says but it's not reality for a very large proportion of people from what I've observed and discussed.

Menachem is right, it's very difficult for young people and even older people to get permanent positions with the protections that some will be smug about.* instead they are on a carousel of short term contracts with little protection.

1980s?* you're joking.* Due to globalisation and other pressures, the expectation of workers is rising not falling.* We all get that some classes of workers are well protected from having to compete in the global sphere but how do you think French workers compete with Romanians, Poles, Bulgarians, Indians, etc when there is no protection?* or for that matter, other western European countries like Ireland, UK, etc where no young person with hopes of a career works 35 hours a week.* I certainly know French people in London don't!

But if it makes you happy to think that all French people work only 35 hours per week, go ahead and believe that.* Just don't expect that we're going to sit here and believe it.

That seems to me to be a dwindling group that sees its rights under attack in waves of "reform". Many employees will now be on short term contracts.

Did you read the France Telecom verdict regarding the wave of suicides during its restructuring around 2005?

Even CDDs are now becoming a thing of the past.

88% of French employees (excluding interim agencies) have a CDI versus 12% with a CDD. Now that it has become easier to terminate a CDI if necessary, the CDDs are less attractive to employers since they have to pay a 10% precarity bonus at the end of the contract.

In my own office, we worked 37½ hours a week and had 11 days of RTT, so there are all sorts of variations, which is what makes things so hard to compare.

16.7% of the employees in France are management level (cadres) and therefore not subject to being paid overtime, although they can claim compensation for putting in extra hours in special circumstances. Only a small percentage of them work "crazy hours" and most of these are in the Paris metropolitan area rat race. Anyway, even if all of these cadres are horribly abused (poor babies), that still leaves 83.3% of the employees running out the door like a shot the moment their hours are up -- remember how it was when the school bell rang? Have you seen how fast supermarket cashiers can close down their register? Or how quickly a government office can lock its door to the public?

That doesn't mean their work is done.

Of course not. I always left enough work for the next two weeks on my desk. It never gave me the slightest urge to stay until midnight to get more done;

Another angle of precarite is the life span difference between blue collar workers and white collar workers. Quoted on France 24 recently was a difference of 16 years in favor of white collar workers. No mention of the source of this statistic was given but panelists seemed to be in agreement. Working this difference equitably into the new pension arrangement will also present difficulties.

Does one really want a 64 year plus policeman, fireman, high school teacher, ER attendant? 64 plus works in some cases, but not in all.

The new system is supposed to lighten the work load for a transition as retirement age approaches. This has been discussed for years, but nobody has yet discovered the best way to do it. For one thing, older workers feel offended when it is implied that they can't do as much as they always have.

But one of the main problems is that the early retirement ages for certain professions due to "difficult" jobs were set back around 1945. Do people really think that work in 2020 is as difficult as it was in 1945?