[quote=flu]
Assuming you are a full time employee, you should have either accrued vacation or the new type of “vacation” policy….[/quote]
Yes I can accumulate paid time-off in my company. Right now I have 15 days of PTO but I don’t have sick days: if I am sick, my PTO goes down.
There are many instances during the year where I need to take a day off here and there. So I am often left with 2 weeks of vacation time per year. At this rate, I will need to wait 4 years to take a 2-month long vacation to France…
It’s hard for me to understand why Americans don’t have more paid time-off. Life shouldn’t be just about work.
But I agree that the French just don’t work enough (yet they are the most productive people in the world). Here is an opportunity for me to criticize and show the absurdity in my own country by providing a little comparison: the minimum length of paid time-off in France by law is 25 days or 5 weeks. But that’s just the beginning.
In 2000, the (socialist) government adopted the 35-hour week measure (versus 39 hours previously). Some companies (mostly government jobs) apply the 35-hour week by forcing their employees to take a day off every other week. But in companies where the 35-hour week is difficult to put into effect (and that’s most medium and large size public companies), employees get extra PTO days (called RTT) to compensate the fact that they still work 39 hours a week. The calculation of the amount of “RTT” days is fairly complex but it varies between 10 and 22 days per year.
But that’s not all. French have 11 paid holidays. When a holiday falls on a weekend, you still get an extra day off. And if the holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, almost all companies give an extra day off so that employees can take a 4-day weekend. That’s an additional 4 to 6 days per year.
As an example. May in France is a very slow month. This year, there are 3 holidays in May: May 1st (Labor Day), May 8th (end of WWII) and May 29th (a Christian holiday called Ascension Day). All fall on a Thursday so that’s 3 x 4-day weekends in just one month!
In total, French people easily accumulate 40 to 50 PTO days per year plus 11 paid holidays! “Et la cerise sur le gateau” (and the cherry on the top): sick days do not count towards these PTO days. I don’t think there is even a limit in how many days you can be sick, as long as you provide the employer with a doctor’s certificate. I recently read that, in 2013, the average French worker took 35 sick days in the year. Crazy!
Add maternity/paternity leaves, plus a few days where you can’t go to work because of strikes in the public transportation and you’ll quickly realize that on average the French don’t even work 1 day out of 2!
