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Published: January 15th 2010
This is my house!
My house is the one in the middle and my window is the top right one!The French don’t work…they have kids.
Today we had class like any other day—it started at nine at the institute, with each of us presenting some sort of French article that we found (for homework). Today, Carl’s article was about how the French had “lost its reputation” as the place where the least amount of work was done. (Although it was still up there—only Germany and Holland beat France.) My article that I found was about how International Living magazine just announced that France is the number one country for quality of life. This spurred a discussion and our teacher telling us a lot more about French culture. Before you read this, make sure you’re ready to pack up and move to France RIGHT NOW. First of all, there is a MANDANTORY five weeks of vacation each year. If it’s December and someone hasn’t used all their weeks, they are required to not go to work for however much time. In addition, there is a pretty much required maternity leave or 16 weeks—eight before you give birth and eight after. But that’s only for the first kid—the second kid you get 18 weeks. And for the third 24 weeks. And it keeps going up. Also, the dads get 4 weeks off when they have kids (paid). Then, after the maternity leave, you have an optional 3 years where either the mother or the father (not both) but one of them can choose to stay home, and are required to be paid 70% of their salary. For the whole time. If they have another kid during that time, another 3 years are added, if they want. AND when the 3 years or whatever are up, the parents are guaranteed the exact same job they left three years ago…what? Our teacher was telling us about how there was a librarian at the institute who took 8 years off because she had three kids…and then she went right back to what she was doing with the same status as 8 years before.
Also, if you’re unemployed, you get 800 euros a month. Plus about 150 more to help pay for rent. Starting at like 16 or 18 or something. All you need is an address. So in other words, go to France, get an address, then quit your job and just eat baguette all the time. It would be a good life.
We discussed this for probably close to an hour because we were all so so shocked by it. After class, we all went to a little Greek place—probably the equivalent of French fast food—Behind the counter there was a huge tower of meat, spinning on a stick (probably 2.5 feet tall or so) and they shaved the meat off to put on some of the sandwiches. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, but later we walked by two more places with the same thing! One of the girls is a vegetarian; I think she almost had a heart attack.
After our afternoon classes, we went back to our houses to rest for a bit, and then went to a creperie together after dinner to discuss our plans for Paris tomorrow!
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G.Irene/G.Walt
non-member comment
Work benefits
Wow, this is unbelievable! I've always heard that Europeans had good vacations packages which seems extreme to us but this maternity leave is very, very generous. Will look forward to hearing about your weekend. Hope you have a great time. Love, Grandma