Europole, Grenoble

When I planned on moving to France two and a half years ago I had little notion of the working culture and environment. Like many Brits, I had only a hazy notion that France is some kind of Shangri-La for the work shy and the gourmand. I thought that just by moving here could add ten years to my life, so I packed my bags. The leisure-centric French lifestyle is one of those national stereotypes – supported by column-inch consuming reports such as this one by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – that we haven’t got tired of hearing. The OECD’s breaking news that the French spend more time sleeping and eating than most people and also live longer probably didn’t raise an enormous number of eyebrows internationally. But where’s the catch? If France is really a worker’s paradise, why doesn’t everyone want to live there? Why are economic migrants from all over the world camped in Calais desperate to go to England?

As an English teacher, my experience of French working life is not just limited to my tasks, but is filtered through the stories recounted by my students, most of whom come from the Grenoble-area business community. I may not have canvassed tens of thousands of people like the OECD, but I must have spoken to hundreds, and it is through their experiences that I have formed a certain understanding of the working culture. Coming to France without a job and hoping to find one’s way may be very difficult, but not impossible. I’ve done my best here to summarize the major particularities of working in France.

1. What is Cadre?

A manager in France is normally considered Cadre, a hierarchical expression that might seem politically incorrect in Anglophone nations. According to a human resources director that I quizzed on the subject, ‘Cadre’ was a nineteenth century term to distinguish between the workers and managers, but is still very much in use and not just in industry. Office hierarchies may be expressed in this way: the workers, who may have contracts with a fixed number of hours (see ‘The 35-hour week’, below), and the Cadre, who have no fixed hours in which to complete their tasks.

Where French employment culture can seem an anathema to Anglophones is that Cadre status often corresponds directly to educational level, i.e., length of study and the attainment of specific qualifications (diplômes). Unlike in Anglophone countries, it is education, more than experience or necessarily proven hard work within a company, that grants Cadre status. A highly skilled technician – for example someone who has studied the application of three dimensional drawing software and is employed to use his skills to develop products – can not expect to be made Cadre just by dint of length of service in a company or, thus, by learning on the job. In fact, if he or she wants to progress up the ladder, he may be expected to return to study to complete the necessary theory and acquire the relevant diploma. If not, he will inevitably be leapfrogged by better-qualified, possibly younger candidates, who have studied to be an Ingénieur. From my experience this can cause some resentment among experienced technicians, but also a despondent acceptance of the status quo.

When I first arrived in France I was perplexed by the number of students who described themselves, with no small amount of false modesty, as Ingénieurs. What I quickly realised was that Ingénieur is a faux amis: it does not in fact translate easily into ‘Engineer’ in English, which is used liberally to mean someone who operates or maintains a machine. A boiler maintenance man in the UK, for example, can refer to himself as an engineer without fear of being accused of some nefarious act of fraud. In France, an Ingénieur is someone who has completed at least 5 years of training in a technical or scientific discipline and enjoys a professional status not far off that of a lawyer or a doctor.

2. The 35-hour week

The 35-hour week is somewhat misrepresented in foreign media as evidence of France’s clock-watching labour culture. What is not always mentioned is that the 35 hours does not include a lunch break (0ne hour or otherwise), so essentially constitutes a 40-hour contract: the standard in the UK for example. What may be true is that many workers contracted to do 35-hours a week do not normally do more than they are obliged to, nor would they be expected to by their employers. A 35-hour week contract suits many employees whose tasks are equal to the allotted time, and whose schedules are arranged as such that many enjoy Friday afternoons off, or even a three-day weekend every fortnight. My contracted hours were not always respected by my employers in the UK.

If you are not Cadre, theoretically your employer keeps track of your hours. If you are Cadre, no-one is paying attention to your hours, just if the job is done. If you work in a company which employs more than 20 people, and are contracted to do a 35 hour a week, you will receive the standard amount of holiday (25 days). If you are contracted to do more (39 hours a week maximum, for non-Cadre), it is possible to receive up to 25 extra days leave a year (known as La réduction du temps de travail or RTT). In smaller companies, there is now a system of income tax-free overtime to compensate workers instead of extra holiday. As I am contracted to work 38.5 hours a week in a small company, at the end of the year the extra 3.5 hours amounts to pleasant chunk of non-taxable income.

3. Why qualifications are more important than experience

The French place complete faith in their educational systems to provide the right skills for the job market. But does this suggest very fixed ideas about the way in which jobs should be done? Can an imaginative and hardworking employee work up the ladder with iniative and flair without the relevant qualifications? At one publishing company I worked at in London, the CEO had started as a teen in the post room and climbed to the top. While such mobility is certainly not impossible in France, the country can appear suffocatingly technocratic rather than meritocratic. This reality often riles Anglo-Saxons but must be tempered by the fact that (non-selective) University education is free and open to all. Although the Grandes Ecoles de Commerce and Engineering schools create fee-paying elites, further education is less the preserve of the privileged than in the UK and US.

4. Annual leave and sick days

In France the standard number of annual holiday allowance is 25 days (five weeks), which will seem outrageously generous to US or Japanese readers but perhaps not so impressive to Brits, for whom 20 is the minimum. If you work in training you may be entitled to a 5 day bonus on top of this.

So what’s the catch? The catch for workers with permanent contracts, especially those from abroad planning on only a short term stay, is that you can’t take your paid holiday immediately. Holiday time is accrued in the first year and banked at the beginning of June. Thus, if you begin work in June, theoretically you are not entitled to any holiday until the end of May the following year. If you begin, for example, in December, you will accrue half your year’s entitlement by June the next year, and that will be your lot for 12 months. RTT excepting, one can only really enjoy a full holiday allowance after an entire year of work or more. If you are lucky enough to have reasonable employers (like me), and a some euros lying around (unlike me), you might be allowed to take unpaid leave. Bizarrely, if you start in June and finish work a year later, the company will owe you money for the untaken leave.

Depending on your field of work, your company may not be obliged to pay you for your first few days off sick (arrêt maladie). After this the employee’s salary is guaranteed by social security. Different industries are tied to respective conventions, labour regulations that dictate everything from pay bands to holiday entitlements. It is worth looking up your convention on the internet to confirm your rights and determine, for example, if you are entitled to supplementary days off for, say, your wedding or moving house.

5. Parental leave

Fully paid maternity leave in France is surprisingly short (only 16 weeks for the first and second child) but must be considered in relation to France’s admirably high proportion of working mothers. Many women take the option of additional full-time or part-time parental leave, for which they are entitled to the Complément de libre choix d’activité benefit, approximately 500 euro per month for full-time leave. While all women with permanent contracts can take parental leave for up to three years and have their job kept for them, first-time mothers are only entitled to it for six months. Fathers, as I well know, are entitled to three days leave at the birth (congé de naissance) and 11 days (taken consecutively, including weekends) congé de paternité. The little tax advantages for parents are numerous and too complex to list here but all conspire to make parenthood in France easier and fairer.

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