Leave benefits in france

It has been more than 5 months since I switched jobs. I do not think I ever wrote about the work benefits in France. I will just mention about the leave benefits here.

In France, the annual leave is 5 weeks. I think this is a standard for all workers. Everyone I know who works here has at least 5 weeks of leave. My company is kind enough to give everyone an extra week. I have 6 weeks of annual leave. On top of that, I have extra days off. In France, the general weekly working hours is 35 hours. Depending on the company policy, workers are compensated with extra off days for extra hours of work. In my present company, we work minimum 39 hours per week. To compensate for the extra hours, we have a day off for every 9 days of work. That is about two off days per month. This day off cannot be accumulated as it is meant to be a day to rest for working extra hard. Of course, there is always an exception for new comer who does not have enough annual leave to go on holidays.

In total, I am paid 54 working days a year for not going to office. This is a big bonus compared to my previous job where I did not have off days even if I stayed back late because I was on 35 hours working week and had only 25 days of leave.

Not everyone has this chance like mine. It is really rare to find such an employee social company. Seb used to work for one such company. But now, he is working for a multi-national company where he has 5 weeks of leave and 12 off days per year.

Days off are really useful in this country where public offices and certain banks are not open on Saturday. Any administrative paper work has to be done during the weekdays and it can take up the whole day just queueing and waiting for your turn. As a foreigner in this country, I do have lots of paper works to be done. Of course, during the strike season, people took a day off to avoid getting caught in traffic.

In my opinion, having so many days of leave does not reduce work productivity and effiency. In contrast, it boosts worker's moral and after a good rest, we are even more motivated and effective in our work.

I remembered that in Singapore, the weekly working hours was 42 hours and yet we worked up to 60 hours when the dateline was near. I had 18 days of annual leave. After we delivered our project, we usually had a day off. I thought I was really fortunate then.