France bans managers from contacting workers outside business hours A new agreement between employer organizations and labor unions in France has made it illegal for French managers to contact their employees about work-related matters outside of normal business hours. The agreement [PDF], which amends an existing pact signed in 1999, specifies that employees must have "the opportunity to …
Yes, but this is your team giving and taking with each other, thats fine. But you don't mention whether the company as a whole actually repay you for being this type of manager. My guess is, you would be just as successful within the organisation regardless of whether you did this or not. Your team may not like you if you did, but I doubt much would change as far as the company is concerned (as long as your still hitting deadlines of course).
> But you don't mention whether the company as a whole actually repay you for being this type of manager.
Er, yes I did, actually: I specifically mentioned pay.
> My guess is, you would be just as successful within the organisation regardless of whether you did this or not.
So you didn't read the bit about contract renewals either, then.
Currently on 12 hour shifts 7 days a week for the next month or so but more normally on 9-10 hour days 5 days a week. A 35 hour week would worse than halve my pay and mean I had less time to accomplish things, significantly lowering job satisfaction. Due to 'office hours' being kept by services like banks, hairdressers, etc I wouldnt even be able to use my time away from work more productively with this shorter week. So miserable and more free time? That'll be more Gin for me, please.
And under this they'd remove my evening/weekend callout payment as well? Scrap all the informal interdepartmental 'giving a hand' stuff that helps us work better together?
Trade Unions really are shitty for workers, aren't they?
That's exactly why the 35-hour week screwed the very workers that it was supposed to be for, the ones who vote socialist.
Martine Aubry (daughter of Jaques Delors, of Sun headline fame), who introduced it, initially suggested that it would reduce unemployment because companies would have to hire additional staff to make up for the 'lost' hours. After that was ridiculed by economists she changed tack and said it was a "progressive social measure to give French workers more leisure time". At which point the white-collar unions, whose members are not paid hourly, asked how their members would benefit from this increased leisure time. The result was an extra 5-12 days per year of "special" vacation for white-collar staff.
Then the blue-collar unions pointed out that it would be unfair for their staff to have their pay cut by being obliged to work fewer hours, and threatened strikes, result was that they got paid the same for 35 hours as they would have done for 39. This included raising the minimum wage. At that point the employers realised that they couldn't afford to hire additional staff, and the least-worst option would be to offer overtime pay to the existing staff, to get them back to 39 hours. Since this would make it look even more stupid, the government placed limits on overtime to avoid the whole exercise being moot.
Unfortunately, lots of very low-paid people had been used to doing large amounts of overtime, 10+ hours a week, to make ends meet. They got really screwed since they lost almost all of it (or moved to the black market, paid under the table, and hence not paying tax on it).
End result is that the hourly-paid workers who voted the government into power came off worst, the employers' costs went up, and the white-collar workers who would normally vote for the rightwingers were laughing all the way to the beach. Needless to say when Sarkozy came to power and tried to relax the 35-hour rules to make France more productive it was the very people who supported him that refused. Helped by the blue-collar unions who promptly said that if their members were going to work more hours in a week they obviously expected more money...
The only real downside was that those white-collar workers with the extra vacation didn't actually see their workload decreasing, they just had to do it in fewer days, hence each working day got longer. That, presumably, is the reason for this new legislation.
The whole thing is a gigantic clusterfuck, from an economically incompetent government, greedy intransigent unions, and 19th century labour laws. And the government still can't understand why the economy is in the shit, the president has a record-beating 19% popularity rating, and the Front National had their best ever score in the municipal elections.
I'm curious, how does it work that I am able to make plenty of money, pay every single one of my staff top of their field pay and have a bonus program that in 2013 paid 26 of my 53 technical staff each more than $1M and has done so for at least 7 staff members for each of the programs 10 years in place?
Why am I not dependent on government handouts or whims to make my money? Cause that's what tax breaks, depressed minimum wages and longer work weeks are you know. Government handouts to businesses that either can't hack it in a competitive marketplace, or are so greedy they feel entitled to take advantage of their staff and fellow tax paying countrymen.
See, because I don't blame others for my failures, or successes it doesn't engender a lot of goodwill on my part when I see people who make just as much, or more, than their peers, lined up to lobby a government for intervention on their behalf when it obviously isn't necessary to do so. See, when you do that, it makes people like me have to cover your ineptitude by increasing my tax burden.
I don't complain about taxes. Sure, it's a lot of money I give the government every year, but it's a tiny fraction of what I get to keep. It's just another cost, no different than the railcars I had built to haul our goods or our plane or our equipment, nobody is handing that stuff out for free. I don't expect anyone to pay bills for me or create a captive market for me. I'll do that myself. Why can't you? Is it ineptitude? Mediocrity? Laziness? Idiocy?
It's something, because running out and crying for help (cut my taxes, make my staff work longer, etc...) isn't anywhere on my list of things to do today. I'll making money. Today I guess it's spending money, they're coming to fill the helium tanks that will cool the lasers in our new mirror polishing line. By this time next year I'll be turning out some of the most highly polished, maybe the most precisely polished metal mirrors made anywhere on the planet. Four years of design and investment all paid for out of my own pocket. Nary a government handout or guaranteed contract in sight. Nope, just what I see as a market that needs to be addressed and in a few years some of your country's tax dollars will be living in my bank. Know why? Because I'm doing something useful and taking risks on my own dime and nobody has to deal with the aerospace globocorps. Yeah, we do the really complex stuff for those guys, they like to make their money with contract voodoo, we make ours through excellence. It works out well.
So tell me, oh impoverished soul, hero of working hard, but getting no work done class, why I don't need someone to blame for holding me back? In the distance I can see the roofs of my two nearest neighbors and they're not going to come out for drinks this afternoon with a pocket full of excuses why they haven't gotten what they wanted from life. They've got the same attitude every successful person I've ever met has; and that's that there's nobody to blame but yourself.
I know you hate to hear it, but it's true. What gives you the right to make my taxes higher so I can support your impoverished enterprise, greed, ineptitude or a combination of all three, when it's plain as day that if you've got something valuable people will pay you for it. They'll pay you lots of money for it. More than enough to to satisfy the likes of you, that's for damn sure. I guess that's only true if you've actually got something worth having isn't it? If you don't have anything desirable then I can see how taking it from others, and getting the likes of me to pay for it, could seem like a good way to try and fill that great gaping hole in your being where pride belongs, but it won't work.
So before you go off blaming everyone else for your situation why don't you start internally and figure out why you need a handout, and I don't. I doubt you be putting in more than my 100 hour weeks, but maybe you are. I only ask why you aren't seeing the returns you think you should on that kind of time investment? If your answer isn't you then you need to go back and look again. You're wrong.
I agree with the sentiment regarding tax and handouts, and that industry breaks are often for the lame horses.
However, they're also for any company floated on the market, who -unlike yourself- will never have 'enough', because they are always legally obliged to seek more. Whereas you might be happy to hand out a million bucks for a job well done because - well, how are you going to find time to spend it yourself - but a company owned by shareholders would rather not. And they'd quite like a tax break, too. And a handout.
Although -as I stated- I agree with the sentiment, I can't condone the self-righteous attitude that seems to have come with it. working 100 hours a week and having lots of money doesn't really make you a better person, so perhaps you can stow some of that.
Fascinating, Don Jefe. And are we to believe that, in the course of running your preposterously successful company, you have never once given any thought about where to run your operation from? It doesn't matter at all, right? You could put your factories in Texas or Albania or Tajikistan or the Central African Republic or Cuba or Vanuatu and it would make no difference at all to your costs or efficency, because all those completely different sets of local conditions and legislation and red tape are completely immaterial, because you are doing something useful and taking risks on your own dime.
What utter, utter bollocks.
The problem France faces is that operating there is just too damn difficult and expensive. They're part of the EU, a single market, so, unless you want to make a foodstuff with an appellation controllee, there is no strategic advantage to basing your operations in France rather than Belgium or Italy or Germany or the UK or Poland. The day-to-day costs are higher, the unexpected costs are higher and more likely, and a whole bunch of countries whose laws won't cripple your firm (at least to anything approaching the same extent) are a few miles away. And your claim is that anyone looking at that situation and doing a quite reasonable cost/benefit analysis and choosing to build their factory in the Netherlands instead of Normandy is actually demanding a government handout to compensate them for their failure. Two questions, then: What handout? And what failure?
Your technical staff who get $1M bonuses: they have never, even once, worked more than 35 hours a week; and they have never, even once, answered a phone call or an email after 5pm. That is what you're saying, right? Because otherwise, what on Earth could your point be?
Phil: I see you're well au fait with how things work in France. Very good summary indeed.
I would add, these labour restrictions are probably part of what they make a) France (outside tourist areas) so mindnumbingly boring on weekends, and b) rely so much on automation and self-service (think roadside F-1 motels, unattended petrol stations, etc.)
Hello,
People are free to use their time as it please them, just don't complain if you don't find a way to use it productively.
Moreover, depending on the type of contract with the company, you may be required to work more, it just protect lower level staff such as technician to work without being paid.
After all the principle is that we do a work for a company against money, not that once we sign a contract all our time belongs to a company.
If a company ask their employee to work more, it is possible, its called over time, and with the exception of managers, every employee can claim it.
Badly up to now, many people expect that any email they received had to be answered right away lowering their quality of life.
I'm glad that the law allows staff to avoid them stress when they fail to reply to an email during their free time. But, if they want to reply, it's their choice.
> Trade Unions really are shitty for workers, aren't they?
No, only when you permit them to do stupid things on your behalf - or you have a stupid government or employer.
I've been in a union for over 20 years now. Not once have I permitted them to negotiate anything on my behalf, because I know that I can do better. So what do I get for my membership dues? Knowledge of what my rights are and a great insurance policy that will provide highly-trained attack lawyers if I ever have a massive falling out with an employer. And like with all insurance policies, I hope that I'm just pissing my money away and that I never have to use those lawyers.
These days small companies need to be agile and respond to global clients and perform tasks at all hours of the day.
* I sometimes have conference calls at 3am local time because we're sorting out an issue with a client on the other side of the planet.
* I used to work with a global company with development teams spread across Europe, USA and NZ. We would have to sometimes do stuff late/early just to get overlap.
* What about trade shows etc?
* What if you're travelling and need some office flunky to sort something out so you can make a connecting flight etc?
Legal decrees are excessive and obstructive to business. When that happens, jobs go away and economies suffer.
'Trying' is excusing failure in advance. Do you know what 'agile' is? Agile is desperate. Agile is running blind. Agile is whoring yourself out because you can't find enough customers or clients who will pay a decent price for your offerings so you'll sell whatever you can to whoever you can for whatever you can get.
If you want to get into commodities trading that's one thing, but if you're not choosing the jobs you take and the customers you walk away from I wonder what you're selling. I wonder why you're not asking yourself that question as well.
If begging for customers and low balling pricing is how you're spending your time why don't you sell cars? You can make a solid six figure salary selling cars and the hours are better too. If you're an expert, if you've got the skills or the product that make you desirable put a decent fucking price tagon it and go to sleep with 1 million thread count sheets and no nightmares of foreclosure.
It's the #1 warning sign when hiring outside contractors for anything that there's something really bad wrong if they're keen to talk up their skills and their client list but are able to meet you on site at your earliest convenience and have really great rates too... See, those things just don't hang out together in real life.
It's like anything else, when you start adding in all the high end options and the cost doesn't make you squirm then you aren't getting high end options. There's an analogue in buying a 'fast car' from some kid with rich parents and a set of wrenches to put a bunch of bolt on parts on the car versus buying a actual fast car from those nice folks at Bugatti. Those fellows at Bugatti aren't going to answer your call in the middle of the night, or even the middle of a meal. They aren't going to rush you a car right over and make you a good deal. You want what they've got and you'll pay for it, dearly, and you'll revel in doing so. Not sweat about spending a little too much.
I'm not trying to be insulting, and I hope I haven't been. But there are a lot of people who have all the skills and heart to run a small business, but don't know shit about business. You aren't there to do anything but make money. You don't have to act like a banker about it, but business isn't about being 'busy', business is about making money. You may get to handle a lot of money if you're running around kissing ass to get a deal done, and there's going to be some of that, for sure. But if 'agile' is part of your culture and core philosophy then handling someone else's money is all you're ever going to get to do.
Polish your skills, act like a fucking professional and schedule the next person that calls for an after lunch slot two weeks from next Thursday and charge them for setting the appointment. If they need you now have a number ready, and it gets paid before you even put down your whisky drink and don't forget to bill them for the cab ride either. Don't drink and drive you know. The customer is always right, and no right is free. Don't you for a second think they wouldn't do the same if the roles were reversed. If customers aren't complaining about the price you're not charging enough.
Polish your skills, act like a fucking professional and schedule the next person that calls for an after lunch slot two weeks from next Thursday and charge them for setting the appointment.
Would that be after lunch my time, or after lunch their time on the other side of the world?
I know which one will lose the customer...
> I know which one will lose the customer...
I think you might be surprised if you try it. DJ has pretty much described my own approach and what you find comes out of it is that people think you must be more valuable, because you know, tu ne te prends pas pour une merde.
I also find that serious customers rarely attempt to contact you at unsocial times, much less expect a response. The ones that ask for the Sun and the Moon (oh, and can we have a discount too) you really want to steer clear of--they're just a waste of time.
"'Trying' is excusing failure in advance. Do you know what 'agile' is? Agile is desperate. Agile is running blind. Agile is whoring yourself out because you can't find enough customers or clients who will pay a decent price for your offerings so you'll sell whatever you can to whoever you can for whatever you can get"
I'm having flashbacks to my boss out of his skull on single malt scotch and Malaysian pain killers in the bar of Traders in KL on day five of a SE Asia meeting marathon.
So you think your chance of having a successful business is more important than someones quality of life? The key term here is work smarter, not longer. If you have to respond to clients around the world, introduce remote working and employ someone in those key areas of the world. It really isn't rocket science.
> So you think your chance of having a successful business is more important than someones quality of life?
I've no idea who/what you're replying to. Do fucking quote please.
In any event, I think most of what has been discussed here boils down to "you can have a successful business AND a great quality of life".
In principle I think they are absolutely right. Implimentation too clunky.
Just because other people are tied to their employer whether they like it or not, doesn't make it right. Everyone needs to be able to get away from work stresses if they are to lead a healthy life. You shouldn't need to fear some form of retribution if you don't answer the phone out of hours - and that is the position far too many people are in. The more connected systems become, the worse this gets.
The real problem is not some overt form of retribution - like being reprimanded or fired - but the more subtle forms, where managers may preference some workers over others.
That is much harder to get rid of.
Making it actually illegal to call employees after hours or have them work overtime does avoid those potential problems but is far too inflexible. You have to accept that many modern businesses require 'after hours' work from time to time or even routinely. While governments must accept that for the sake of the economy, they must also accept that people and their families require 'down time' - for the sake of the well being of the population.
It is a balance and not always an easy one. That's why things usually go back and forward in search of an equilibrium. Unfortunately, with so many of the variables in constant flux, that equilibrium doesn't really exist.
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If it weren't Oil it would be our vast mineral reserves, diamonds, uranium, forestry, agriculture, growing educated population or even our limestone deposits. Oil's cheap-and-easy for now, but Alberta is huge. We've got enough environment to ruin that we can keep at this for quite some time.
Hell, we could just sit here, dam up all our rivers for hydro, set up eleventy squillion windmills by Crow's Nest pass, stand up a bunch of nuke plants, sell all the 'leccy to the states and live like kings.
Alberta's problem is now, and has been for decades, inadequate manpower. The socially conservative xenophobes that live in the middle of south buttfuck nowhere are so terrified of furriners that not only will the Tea Party have nothing to do with them the Baptists threw them out! We have low immigration caps and ridiculous barriers to entry directly into the province. This prevents us from growing our workforce and it is the brakes on our economy.
That said, we do indeed have laws here that say things like "thou shalt not contact people out of hours unless you pay them stupendous amounts of money. Certain jobs can be exempted from this if the employee agrees, but you can not discriminate against employees who actually want a work/life balance." We're crying for wetware to weld the pipes and twiddle the knobs and despite this we do just fine with our "draconian" labour laws.
The French have the right of this. And that's with my business owner's hat on; the one that actually does have 24/7 clients to support.
Sadly, Alberta has very few "knowledge workers" in that sense. We've a crazy amount of Structural/Mechanical/Civil Engineers, Geologists and so forth, but if you do IT and you aren't crazy you get the hell out of this province. It sucks that it took me until I was too poor to move to recognize that, but "trickle down economics" absolutely doesn't work.
IT - like many other things including heath care - is viewed as a burdensome cost that employers and citizens alike shouldn't have to pay for. These are people who will gladly spend $200,000 on a kitted out half-ton work truck but balk at the idea of spending $550 to buy a new laptop.
Alberta has a powerful economy with lots of things besides Oil that can and will keep it steaming along for decades...but the culture of Alberta is one of implementers, not innovators. This is not a place to invent new things, to improvise or experiment.
Other places in the world invent things. Then we put manpower together with a willingness to wreck any part of the environment necessary to make money and create fantastic amount of wealth. 90% of which leaves the province to the companies that do all the environment-wrecking resource extraction and the other 10% of which people hoard.
There's lots wrong here, but it isn't the labour laws screwing us up...
> We have low immigration caps and ridiculous barriers to entry directly into the province. This prevents us from growing our workforce and it is the brakes on our economy.
Those things don't prevent you from growing your workforce; they prevent you from growing it very cheaply in significantly less than twenty years. To actually prevent it, you'd need forced contraception too.
So, sorry - is it "illegal" to call someone or simply illegal to fire someone who ignores you when you call?
The bit about being able to ignore your phone implies the latter because if it really was illegal to call employees after hours then wouldn't the hypothetical dinner-eating peon be obliged to report that manager?
The modern flexibility of businesses means that there is nothing inherently wrong with working at night or on the weekend. What needs to happen (and I don't know if it is the case in France) is for governments to enforce strict limits on what is 'normal' working hours but couple that with mandatory loading for anything outside that time, including minimum payments.
For example, if you call an employee on Saturday, that employee gets paid double-time and for a minimum of 1 hour - even if the call was for 5 minutes. The goal is to enable flexibility but to strongly promote companies employing sufficient staff to do the work, rather than relying on overtime.
Of course, some politicians go the other way, such as the Liberal (Conservative) party in Australia, who want to get rid of penalty rates altogether.
@heyrick
True, and that is why I said that that is what should happen.
A strong modern economy requires some flexibility - if you can't have people working on weekends then 24/7 helpdesks will be outsourced to a country that does allow it*.
A healthy population - mentally, physically, socially - requires respect of personal/family time. As Don Jefe said, it doesn't matter if that time is spent playing with the kids or eating mayonnaise, it's important and governments and employers need to accept that
Companies - as a rule - don't really care about their employees' time outside of work. That's why regulations need to exist that place a value on that time and oblige companies to pay for the privilege of imposing on it.
An employee's private time is a resource. That resource should be available for companies to make use of but it is a valuable resource and must be treated as such and never taken for granted. Many, many, many employees just don't have the ability to get just compensation for the use of their time and this is were government regulations step in.
Those who can already name their price don't need those protections but many 'ordinary people' do.
* - Of course that's likely to happen anyway but some companies genuinely do want local support available for their clients and they charge appropriately. Many businesses are willing to and, in practice, do, pay for that service level.
Good for the French, but it only happens because knowledge workers let it happen.
I think it started with project managers. In my experience (as an ex-low level manager in a large corporation), the project managers did expect that everyone else would live at the office just like they did. And gradually over time everyone did start working longer and longer, when really they should have told the PM to get stuffed. And then when it came to pay rise time, this extra work was never ever recognised.
I remember one conference call for managers where the regional boss said the main reason that there was no cash being made available for pay rises for the third year in a row was that none of the technical staff had left so they must be happy with their lot.
I got out and became a contractor for which my reward is a better work life balance, better pay and less stress. I still keep in touch with many of my former colleagues and most of them are still there working stupid hours , they are still miserable and they are still not getting pay rises. It is getting rather difficult to still be sympathetic with them when they don't do anything positive about changing the situation. The power is in their hands. There are good jobs out there but they don't move on. The PMs cannot do the work without them, yet collectively they let the PMs treat them like doormats.
Seems a bit mean blaming the Project Manager, they don't hold the purse strings or determine the delivery time frame that's specified higher up the chain.
Its simple supply and demand.. more techs has kept the lid on wage prices and there are so many, that basic techs are seen as two a penny and so are a burn-through resource by management.
The only way to get away from this, is to skill up and thereby reduce the supply (ie. you have a more unique skillset) and hope demand is there. I personally started off as 1st line support, hated it, changed companies and moved into 2nd line support, (paid for my own training in those days MCSEs were the in thing, racking up over £5k in credit card debts) then changed companies again into 3rd line support and gradually you get the more difficult stuff to sort out and become the go-to knowledgeable person. Its amazing how easy it is, just read the manual is a good start! I ended up running infrastructure projects as the company wasn't large enough for dedicated PMs, and therefore over time moved into PM'ing and was lucky(?) to get on a few courses to get official PM qualifications.
As a side note, its not just techs, I run a team of PMs; I was recently interviewing for a PM position. I was amazed by the dross of chancer contract PMs that come along with CVs littered with typos and when you dug into their history they had no idea of the actual Projects they were suppose to have delivered.
"Tell me about the Projects that you managed"
"I PM'ed a server upgrade program,"
"Ok what OS was that?"
"Windows"
"What version did you upgrade?"
"erm, err, from version 1 to version 2"
right...the door is behind you
End of the day, you are in control of your own career, you can't expect to sit in the same chair and get auto-promoted. Always amazes me when I'm in the pub with a 2nd line support guy moaning away how poorly paid they are, yet aren't poorly paid enough to update their CV.
> Seems a bit mean blaming the Project Manager, they don't hold the purse strings or determine the delivery time frame that's specified higher up the chain.
Actually a very big part of a successful project manager's job is saying "no" to management. Only if they do that will they reliably get their projects delivered on time and on budget.
"Seems a bit mean blaming the Project Manager"
Sorry but I've dealt with too many shiny suited muppets with a Prince2 qualification to ever feel sorry for a PM, but you'll always slide further on bullshit than elbow grease!
Other than that, I agree with everything you said.
I've always felt that the biggest advantage of email is that I can write when it suits me, and people can respond when it suits them. So I liked being able to write an email at stupid o clock if it suitse me, knowing it wouldn't disturb Jane or Bill until they turned the PC on. But now I have to start figuring whether I'd be disturbing someone by emailing at a time when I wouldn't consider making a phone call, plus time zones too.
So whereas before I had the choice of voice when it was 24*7 urgent and email when it was next office hours urgent, now I don't, which is crazy.
Fascinating. This reads just like a set of comments from the Guardian, from people whose jobs have never hung in the balance.
That is, okay in theory but in practice, unworkable. You can just see a group of people working on a 'must win or lose your job because the company folds' opportunity, simply turning off their mobile because the law says so. Try working in a multinational across timezone differences where this rule applies - because it will not. People will take their business elsewhere.
Fine, ignore the phone, ignore the email as instructed but when you come into work on Monday and find you have been out manoeuvred by a foreign company who used that extra time to do something which put them ahead of you. You lose that important piece of business, your company suffers, and ultimately you lose your job and end up wishing that someone would call you during their work hours while you sit around in your pyjamas.
Yes, it would be nice if such rules were universally applied across industry but such rules will never be applied in an international market like that on this plane of existence and doing it will eventually result in your business suffering and people will lose jobs as a result.
And God knows the French have enough problems with job creation without wondering how they will replace yet more lost jobs, due to another nail in the coffin of productivity.
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