Lazy Frenchmen

The French? Working harder? How novel.

The French government is proposing plans to ease the rules on the country's 35-hour working week.

However, a recent poll shows that the majority of French workers do not want to work longer hours.

The French parliament was due to begin on Tuesday afternoon a three-day debate on a bill that would relax the rules.

The reform would allow workers to put in more than 35 hours a week in return for more pay if they reach a collective accord with their company and union.

The government says this reform is aimed at stimulating the economy and creating jobs.

I was in France from 16th to 19th September of last year, almost exactly seventy-two hours. Had I arrived twenty-four hours earlier, I wouldn't have been able to go up in the Eiffel Tower because the workers strike at the end of every national holiday in order to get a couple more days off from work.

Now, there are some Americans that work far too much (like Lee over at Right Thinking), but as a whole we put in a good forty (or more) hours a week. Most Europeans can't be coerced to work during the weekend under any circumstances.

How the Europeans can justify artificially inflating the value of the Euro is beyond me. European unemployment is extremely high, as the aforementioned Lee noted here last night, and there are any number of reasons why the Europeans should be begging us to help them.

Will it change any time soon? Doubtful.