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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

In france, the legal norm is the 35 hours work week.

I wish there would be ways to reduce work time to reduce unemployment and "share" labor, but my guess is that it's more difficult for employers to organize under such model.

The problem isn't only overwork, but it's also the labor distribution and competition among job candidates. The more work is done by one person, the less labor is left to create jobs.

Honestly I've left this rat race of job competition a long time ago, it's depressing. I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home. Money is not a problem. I'm not a merchandise.

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> In france, the legal norm is the 35 hours work week.

Except that in France, the norm for knowledge workers is to work more (38-40h is normal) and get the difference compensated in extra holidays (RTT).

Also most of them don't actually clock their hours and have contracts only stating days ("au forfait"), so the actual worked hours aren't counted at all and often exceed the theoretical amount.

To be fair, 35 hours in qualified jobs is really rare and this limit is only working for jobs that are paid hourly (when your employer counts the number of hours you work to determine your pay).

The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.

But nevertheless, we probably are amongst the countries where you work the less (and it never had a negative impact on economy).

> To be fair, 35 hours in qualified jobs is really rare and this limit is only working for jobs that are paid hourly (when your employer counts the number of hours you work to determine your pay).

Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours

> The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.

35 hours is the expected salaried agreement, similar to 40 hours in the US. I expect most of Europe is 35 hours and that is protected by labor laws.

> Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours

Are they really? I'm British, and I don't think I've ever seen an IT-based job contracted at only 35h per week. 37.5h or 40h seem to be the norm.

Yah definitely wrong on my part saying “almost all”, Maybe not at an IT specific company? But this is what I’ve seen in IT departments in finance (37.5, 9 - 5:30) and other large commerce (35, 9 - 5) companies, in my short career.

I know some people in France that say 35 hours is mandatory, but some work more anyway.

I think it means if you assume lunchtime is part of work or not. I'm in the UK, every job I've had is 9-5 or 9:30-5:30, with a 1 hour lunch break.

I'm in the UK and I don't think I've ever encountered a job with those hours.

The shortest "standard working hours" I'm aware of is 9.00-5.30 with 1 hour for lunch in places with formal time. That's 37.5 working hours.

In Germany, the official statistics for 2019 state that someone who was fully employed worked 41.0 hours per week on average, when part-time employed the number was 19.5 hours. The average over all employees was 34.8 hours.

Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit... (in German). The article also contains a table of the average for a lot of European countries, which range from 30.4 in the Netherlands to 45.4 in Turkey. The article also states that the majority of the differences in the average working hours between the countries are typically due to a different ratio of part-time to full-time jobs.

In Sweden, we are supposed to work 40 hours a week. However, working time includes 2x15 min daily coffee breaks and 1 weekly "wellness" hour. So ... I guess it's a 36.5 hours a week country. :)

> I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home.

that just means you're living off taxation of the wealthier. It's not sustainable if everybody did this - at least not under today's technological capability.

People only become wealthy by capitalizing on the skills and labour of those less wealthy so I don't see any problem with taxing some of that and using it to help the less wealthy, instead of allowing them to evade paying anything with loopholes and hiding their money offshore.

> It's not sustainable if everybody did this

Well there always are certain jobs that are necessary to exist, but there is a large quantity of them that has very low value and nothing would be lost if they did not exist.

People don't eat money.

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