Do French people really have 8 weeks of vacation per year?
The answer is, YES! French have paid vacation (anywhere between 25 and 30 work days per year) + a system called RTT.
In order for you to understand this, you need to know that French employees are split up into:
Cadres - Executives (white collar)
Non Cadres - Non-Executives, which is split up into many different sub-cateogories. People working in this cateogry pay less taxes but have less benefits. They also clock in and out and the can only work a certain amount of hours per month; which brings me back to RTT's.
Basically, the French government came up with this idea around 2000 under the Jospin (socialist) government. The idea was to cut the work week down from 39 hours to 35 per week so that companys would hire more people. in return, employees hours became more flexible (those who clock in because it makes no difference to executives who work as many hours as they want). In reality, people still work on average more than 35 hours a week, so the governement came out with extra vacation days to compensate for that. It's calculated every year within each complay based on the 35 hour work week and the number of work days in the year. It's pretty theoretical but in the end it limits paying empoyees overtime. The right-wing party critized this policy because in the end nobody hired more people (too expensive tax-wise) and ended up having to give everybody a lot of vacation days.
