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US CEO Says French Workers Have Three-Hour Work Day
First time accepted submitter M3.14 writes "In a letter addressed to French Industrial Renewal Minister, Maurice Taylor, chief executive of Titan, writes (French article with English letter) that it would be stupid to buy any factory in France since workers don't really work full time. He'd rather buy cheap factories in India and China instead and import tires back to France. He writes, 'They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!'"
Just to give a litttle perspective to all of you Objectivists out there, Maurice is a naughty boy http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr19107.htm, and I'd take anything he says with either a pound of salt or 50k slipped into your brief case.
But hey, free markets right?
No kidding. Don't take your vacation days, otherwise you can say goodbye to any chance of a promotion and hello to the front of the line for a layoff.
Funny that the summary doesn't include his initial statement to the French industry official that approached him: "How stupid do you think we are?"
In a word: Very.
CNN observes that Taylor is not only a relic of the 80s' leveraged buyout "corporate raiders" era, he's a hypocrite as well for wanting to make tires in China:
"The U.S. government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don't get the duties, the government does," said Taylor.
All of this is beside the point however. US workers have less vacation/break time than anyone else on the planet, in a time where it is increasingly recognized that giving more breaks to workers results in more productivity. The real stupidity comes from failing to notice how well the rest of the world can keep pace with the much-vaunted "American productivity" while maintaining a vastly better quality of life.
Oh Yes.
Come down to India and China, where we have no goddamn lives any more. We work more than 12 hours a day on menial tasks at odd times. Forget work-life balance, because we really have no lives. And we work because that's how poor we are, with little choice in life and no government looking out for us. Train us. Use us. Abuse us. Talk to us in racial undertones. Marvel at our ability to take crap for little money.
Get away with your profits.
Welcome to the bright world of outsourcing.
...And it didn't really work, apparantly. France is only two placed behind the US in GDP per hour worked.
I hate hour long lunches
ok I did not hate them when I lived 5 min away from my house, but otherwise OMFG shoot me in the head with a nail gun ... even if I go somewhere it doesnt take me an hour to eat a sandwich, then what do you do
I rather go home a half hour earlier
Um, they earn more than that in Germany but have a better lifestyle.
If you're going to post anonymously anyways, you could name the company at the very least. That way people could be warned against the company and/or look up said company to see if there's any other data points that'd corroborate your anecdote.
Hell, I never took vacation... maybe 3 or 4 days in the last year. I got laid off anyway, never mind a promotion. I got no severance pay, but they gave me 70% of my remaining vacation time in cash.
The lesson is: use your vacation. You may not get a chance later.
i'm french, i'm working around 50 hours a week, and i'm lunching in a quarter.
the next 2 weeks, i will be in my sister company in USA, and, i'm really sorry, i'm not impressed by the productivity and organisation
me : 95% work, 5% communication
USA : 50% work, 50% communication on the work
where is the productivity ?
Naming the company, and mentioning 30+ million dollars of returned equipment, would likely make the poster's identity very much not anonymous!
where i am it only takes a few years... so it doesnt take long to be full of teachers who cant be fired regardless of their ability
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yeah, how dare they have more than 0 weeks of vacation per year. I can understand why it was hard for you to deal with such evil.
So let me get this straight... You were an arsehole to someone and then you're upset when the person you were an arsehole to didn't thank you for it?
Fucking timezones. How do they work?
No. No it's not.
Please check your facts. I'm sure Illinois has an equivalent to: http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/sa/cefavgsalaries.asp
Teachers' salaries have plummeted since the late 80's. In california, the average salary is around 68k (up 1% from 2011!) and under 50k for new teachers. This is common knowledge at every california university, so there's a lesson in here somewhere. What I was interested in, is where you get this outrageous number of 75k from? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/16/correction-chicago-teacher-salary-average-is-74000/ --- probably something related to this.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Dude - read what the GP said again. He wasn't ranting about union members. He was ranting about union administrators. And he has a point.
Take for example Craig Thomson. He was the national secretary of the Health Services Union in Australia, so he was supposed to represent those nurses and ambulance drivers you were talking about. Instead he flew around Australia spending their money on prostitutes and funding his personal political campaign.
Note that he was never a health professional himself, but before getting on the union gravy train he studied to become a lawyer.
This is the type of scum that the GP is talking about - that has infested the top administrative levels of a lot of unions. There are more examples of union corruption than I can be bothered to list here. Anyone who doesn't think that the union movement needs a cleanup is wearing blinkers.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Headline: CEO says French workers have a 3 hour day.
Article: CEO says that French workers have a 7 hour day but loaf a lot.
In this case it's not just Slashdot that's to blame for the misleading headline, but come on. What he actually said may be insulting to the French, but is not inherently ridiculous. What the headline claims he said is ridiculous. Sensationalism.
The french minister sent an answer to Maurice Taylor (who is known to be a troll btw). I couldn't find an english translation but it's a well written answer. (sorry, only pdf's and jpg available at this time)
answer page 1
answer page 2
About the 3h/day of talking, the factory was in a transition period where they temporarily switched their production line from tires for car to tires for truck, and the production line for car tires wasn't fully operational anymore. Taylor would have sent the workers home without payment, but the french union refused. That's their difference.
Of course french workers are not allowed to chat for 3h/day, anyone with a sane mind and who have worked in real life understands this.
I much prefer working with Swiss or Germans - many of the ones I've worked with won't do much more than a 9 hour day, but they'll work very hard during those 9.
Are you really suggesting that a 9 hour day is some kind of acceptable norm or am I misunderstanding you? You guys should be aiming for a maximum of 40 hours / wk for a decent work/life balance.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm not sure about Australia, but in the US schools also spend tons on electronics, but can't afford textbooks. The school district I work in is like this. For example, the junior high Social Studies department is getting new textbooks next year, but they can't afford one for each student. So, they are getting 75 books, 25 for each classroom. The high school Social Studies is in the same situation. I just don't know the number of books they're getting as I don't work up there.
Now, the junior high also just received 25 new kindle ereaders. This came from the state and was some sort of reward or something for the state writing exam in January. The school didn't have to pay for them. This is in addition to the 10 kindles we got at the beginning of the year because the school got some sort of grant to pay for them. The one nice thing about the kindles is that we have seen far more kids checking out the kindles and actually reading them than dead tree copies.
What it comes down to, at least in my district, is there is no grant money for textbooks. So, the school has to pay for those with their budget money. Math has to wait a few years more now for new books, which is sad as many of our Algebra I books don't have covers and are badly damaged because they're so old. The district picked Social Studies first because their books are older and in worse shape. They also still have Newt Gingrich as speaker of the house.
Any kind of electronics that the school wants, they can probably get. This is because there are thousands of grants out there for them. Our entire district got mobile laptop labs two years ago, all paid for by grants. I don't know if there are any textbook grants out there or if the state doesn't allow such things, but we never have money for books, but we have tons of grant money for just about everything else.
He wasn't an actual plumber (as in having taken and passed the licensing tests in his state). He was a grunt working for an actual plumber.
Without that license, he wouldn't have been legally able to buy the company, either....
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"There is no reason their total lifetime earnings should exceed that of the grunt plus the cost of their education unless they are working more hours overall and then the increase should be relative to the number of extra hours."
Pure and utter bull.
People have different abilities, different aptitudes, different attitudes, different personalities, etc etc and so forth.
A doctor will always have a greater worth to society and economy than a burger flipper. Always. You cannot argue otherwise.
It's also much harder to become doctor, there are far fewer people able to do it, and who want to do it.
So why in hell should the burger flipper be entitled to as much lifetime earnings as the doctor?
Don't you realize that if an economy were managed in such a way you effectively create huge disincentive for people to become doctors? Some still will, but many will look at Easy Path A compared to Hard Path B, see they achieve the same result, and thus choose A.
If someone is content to be a burger flipper their whole life, have at it. I've known a few people who were fine with it (though eventually two of them decided to open their own place and now have a successful local chain, and just sold their first franchise a few hundred miles away).
As a humanist, the inclination is to say that people have the same worth. And they do on a human scale.
But when it comes to how they choose to spend their time in trade for money, they absolutely do have different worths.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Breaking the law, like an awful lot of people in France, and nobody cares. There's this old notion of "cadre" / "non-cadre" in French labor law, and if you're an engineering or master level you're a cadre. Now if you're a cadre there's a special regime where hours are not counted, and the "35 hours" law just amounted to a lump of extra vacation days. You're still supposed to do 48h max but nobody tracks this. A lot of companies are using this and making 50+ hours is quite common. Yes, it is illegal strictly speaking but nobody cares. By "a lot" I mean a lot of big companies in internationally competitive markets, and most small companies. In high tech this set-up is mostly a given.
;).
Now if you're in a big company, particularly if it's protected from international competition or has public roots, then it's a different story. You can be cadre and having to do 35 hours maximum, enforced with badging in some places with strong unions. One example I have in mind is doing military equipment and the French state is the main client.
And actually, even public companies themselves often break the law. Go to any public hospital and you'll find doctors and nurse pulling 60 to 70h work week just because there's not enough people to do the work and the hospitals can't afford to hire more. Everyone know the 35 hours are just not applicable in many contexts, and turn a blind eye to it.
The GGP story is maybe true but is just an anecdote in any case, you don't judge a whole country based on that. What you have to keep in mind is that 56% of the French economy is public economy, which is the highest in Europe. The public sector is then dominant, and rather protected, and can indulge in lazy practice (although there are hard workers too. They often get depressed after a while due to lack of recognition). But the others are working hard and efficiently enough to make France the n5 economy. And that's a statistically significant result not an anecdote
Bullshit.
We are also bound to the 48 hours limit.
But hours between 35 and 48 must be either overpaid or given back as vacation. And that 35 hours limit legally applies only to companies with more than 20 employees.
Most other EU countries also have a similar limit, but above 35.
And most managing jobs have employment contracts that make the pay not related to the hours worked, so the 35 hours limit doesn't apply. In that case, most get about 2 weeks of additionnal vacation (in addition to the legal 5 weeks).
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, DC, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming all allow the employer to not pay out accrued vacation time on termination in the absence of a contract or company policy saying they will.
Only Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota (only if employed there for at least 1 year), Oklahoma, Rhode Island (after 1 year, like ND), and South Carolina require accrued vacation/PTO time to be paid out.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time