I was talking to a conservative friend recently about the French work-force. We talked about vacation, work-week, and so on. I was shocked when in the middle of the conversation, this normally critical friend said, “Well, the French are actually far more efficient workers than Americans.”
This is certainly not what I perceived or heard from French people during my time in France, yet he seemed to have a point. He said that he had read that Americans work so much that they actually become very unefficient. They start to dilly-dally, playing games on the internet. Yet, French people have shorter days and longer vacations so that when they do work, they stay more focused.
That ain’t how I hear it. It’s so difficult to fire someone in France that there’s no incentive to be productive…so no one is. Your friend does have somewhat of a point, though, about American workers. However, I blame management: salaried workers are pushed into so much uncompensated overtime that they begin to slack off to maintain sanity. It’s fine to be required to work hard; it’s not fine to be required to work desperately hard.
Methinks this actually has the opposite effect. If it’s difficult to fire people, then employers are reluctant to hire them in the first place. This gives them more incentive to try and squezze as much productivity out of the workers they do have as is possible, where in the US one can simply hire more workers if more labour is needed, then fire them if demand slackens. Indeed, according to here France’s productivity per worker per hour is greater then the US (or indeed anywhere in the world). The US pulls ahead in net productivity, however, since its workers work longer hours, as the OP suggests. Of course the downside is greater unemployment, since no one wants to hire unless they have to.
Granted making it harder to fire people dulls one of the incentives that employers have to get their employees to work hard, but I imagine that French employers have many other options to coax/punish their workers (pay, promotion, etc), as do employers in the US.
From what I’ve seen the French enjoy a pretty good standard of living.
Their infrastructure is in very good condition, especially compared with the UK
My memories of France in the 1960’s was that it was pretty ramshackle, 120v DC power, dodgy water and the metro looked Victorian. So they have made great strides.
I would guess that they are pretty efficient, and that their problems with unemployment are largely down to reluctance to run a UK/USA style economy stoked up on consumer credit.
For productivity to effort ratio I think the French produce more per amount of effort. But they are not very productive. Too much ‘nanny state’ has left many French workers very blasé about work ethics. So whilst there is probably less requirement to be seen to be working there is also less actual work getting done if it can be gotten away with. This view of mine comes from interaction with only a small subsection of French IT workers, but seems to be a pattern I hear of repeated in other sections of the French workforce.
Disclamer: Some of my best friends are French, and some of them have extremely good work ethics. Comme ci comme ça, c’est la vie!
Err…I don’t know how anyone would measure productivity per “effort”, but my link from above claims that the French are more productive per hour worked then, not only thier US counterparts, but anyother workers in the western world.
Sorry I couldn’t get to your link. Probably not because of any problem with your link itself (I’ve had problems getting to several UK sites for a while now).
What I’ve seen of French working if that any effort is considered completely optional within the working environment. I’d be interested in knowing what the values of “hour worked” used in the calculation of the above statistics were. I’m sure the US hours worked per employee is much higher than the French or UK values. And would wonder what the statistics of productivity per member of the workforce looked like for all those countries.
Depends how you look at it. The French have a much lower GDP than the US and a slightly lower one than UK. But they are prevented from earning more because the French Govt limits full time work to 35 hrs per week. Which was done to lower the unemployment rate. Which has gone up since last year and remains over twice that of the US or the UK. So for whatever you can glean from GDP per hour it doesn’t translate to earning potential or food on the plate.
Disclaimer, I don’t have any French friends but I do occasionally have a french fry. And isn’t that really what having ketchup is all about.
You’re quite right. US employees are more productive annually then their French counterparts as, while they are less productive per hour, they work more hours per week (and of course more of them are working at all).
As for your personal observations, the French’s laid back attitude in the workplace is apparently not preventing them from keeping up with thier American competitors, at least on an hourly basis. Keep in mind that things like infrastructure, IT, investment, etc. affect productivty, not just the attitude of the worker. The laziest American with a tractor will plow a field far faster then the hardest working Vietnamese peasant going at it from dawn till dusk with a handheld hoe.
Well obviously the French system has problems, high unemployment being one of them. But my point is not that the system is better then the US, just that it creates higher worker productivity on a per hour basis.
And I imagine high productivity does translate to higher earning potential, at least for those that can get a job.
Are you sure the document you linked to cover all cuntries, or simply compares some of them? Because, last time I checked, France was ranked something like 4-6 in productivity/hour (indeed above the UK/USA, I believe the USA was something like 25th or so, behind most european countries), and, IIRC, the top ranking country was Belgium.
I would note also that, if I’m not mistaken, services represent a larger part of the french GNP than of the US one, and generally speaking, people working in services are more productive than people working in the industry.
I’ve been told the same by people who had worked in the USA : that amerian white clar stayed forever at their office, but hardly ever worked, spending much time at the coffee machine, on the net, socializing, etc… I’m not saying that it’s representative, just that it was their experience.
You’d think, but it doesn’t. France is way behind the US in GDP per capita. France has one of the lowest in Europe.
Bottom line, if you can find a job in France you’ll be limited in what you can earn but will earn it efficiently. You’ll have more time available to bitch about your job and cheap wine to make it all better.
With the typical hours of a US employee, they could probably do 80% of their job in half the amount of hours most of the time. But when it comes to deadlines they make full use of their extremely high work hours. In France they work for fewer hours, and usually get as much done as an American Employee, but when it comes to deadlines they have no hope, since they only work the 35 hour week they can never do 45 hours of work in a week when it would be helpful for their company.
Neither system is ideal, Americans spend lots of time at work unproductively (like on SDMB mmmm…) but also put out 50+ hour weeks when necessary. French don’t waste time R&Ring at work when they could be doing that at home, but don’t do the 50+ hour weeks when necessary. A more flexable system would be better in both cases. But that would require a certain amount of enlightened employers, who wouldn’t missuse the ability to sometimes request 50+ hour weeks, and to recognise that being seated at a desk for 9hours a day doesn’t equal 9 hours of productivity if there is only 7 hours of work required that day.
Having been to France several times I SERIOUSLY doubt this. The French can REALLY put away some wine. Besides, I don’t think wine is all that popular in the US compared to beer and other alchohol (just a WAG on my part…I know for myself I prefer single malt Scotch any day to wine).
Its probably a valid comparison to look at US workers vs French…but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. I think, taken as a whole, the US economy, despite this stupid war we are in and other fuckups by the present administration, is perking along at a much higher clip than Frances. And the problems WE face are as nothing compared to what the French face in the coming years wrt their economy and the various holes they have dug for themselves. THAT is, IMHO, where the real comparison is.
Here is the definition of GDP:
GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports − imports)
I’m wondering how differences in our economies might skew this productivity calculation. This is not to say I believe American’s or French or harder workers, I have no knowledge one way or the other, but I would be surprised if it’s as simple as GDP/hours worked.
Nope. First, we can do overtime. Second, it doesn’t apply to managers. Third, along with the 35h/week law came a reform allowing more flexibility, in particular to work more during certain periods and less during others without the company paying overtime, and many branch agreements were redrafted to take advantage of this possibility.
Of course the most obvious solution to the deadline problem is the first I mentionned : overtime. If the deadline is that important, the company probably can shell out some more €, don’t you think?
A general comment about productivity: Resist the temptation to think of productivity, either per hour or per worker-year, as a measure of “how hard people are working”. Productivity is primarily a function of the infrastructure and technology with which people have to work. There is a great deal of hard work, and low productivity, in India and China.
Given that infrastructure and technology are relatively similar in France and the United States, I’m not surprised that France has higher productivity per hour:
There is the phenonmenon of “diminishing returns”, so that it stands to reason that the additional hours worked by the average American in a given year will be less productive than the first 1,600 hours worked in each country.
High unemployment tends to correlate with higher productivity, because marginally productive workers don’t get hired. Since they aren’t working, they don’t produce anything, but they also don’t count in the denominator.
I don’t see how low GDP per capita translates to a low average salary.
I’m pretty sure that GDP per captia includes non-working people in the “per capita” part. So France’s would be lower even if the average incme was the same there as in the US, since they have a much higher precentage of their population unemployed.
Of course you might be right and French people may lower average incomes (they certainly have a higher tax burden in anycase), but I don’t think comparing GDP per capita demonstrates this (my google-fu is unequal to the task of finding average income stats in the two countries, perhaps someone else can find some numbers).
My bad, I think its just across the G7 countries, not the world at large.
