In addition, most are required to take their vacation (usually 20 days - a full month) during the month of August (varies by company). Sweden does the same thing for the month of July. At least that was the schedule for the companies I worked for at the time. Of course, being based in a U.S. subsidiary, I did not have to adhere to any such schedule.
Most of vacation in Europe is centered around the school schedule.
To take a week here and there is not common, as it is in the U.S.
French employers have considerable say in when their staff can take vacation time. If the factory closes all through August, that's 20 of your 30 vacation days you have to take right there. No kids and don't want to pay premium high-season prices for vacation accommodations? Tough.
Alternatively, if your company doesn't shut, and insists that 2 out of 3 people doing job X must be around at all times, and the two more senior people want to take four weeks each in July and August, then as the junior you're going to be scrambling to find ways to take your family away. Something similar to this has happened to DW for the last 3 years. Her boss has asked the two more senior people to "try and be more flexible", but they have little incentive to comply. Fortunately, with DS/DD out of the house, we don't need to take too much time away in the summer.
The Swedish situation is, I believe, slightly different. I recall reading that it's a
legal requirement there for people to take a 3-week break from work once a year, presumably for some kind of psychological/de-stressing reasons (although since the arrival of e-mail and BlackBerry, maybe that doesn't work as well for all types of employment). This was mentioned in the French media a couple of years ago when a trader lost his bank 5 billion Euros (he basically shorted the entire German stock market; 5 billion was what it cost the bank to unwind his 50 billion Euro position over a weekend, while keeping things *very* quiet). It turned out that he had been covering up a series of increasingly dangerous trades over the previous 3 years, during which time he had taken *zero* vacation days, partly because he was becoming obsessed, partly out of fear that someone would look at his accounts while he was away.
A Frenchman once told me about the 'social contract' the French have with their country/government. They willingly pay high taxes in exchange for many benefits that are 'extra-cost' for we Americans. It's far to complex of a cultural issue to be understood in a news article written at the 6th grade level.
This is true, although the specific term "social contract" doesn't come up much in conversation (perhaps because it's such a part of the wallpaper). It's also true, to a greater or lesser extent, of most European countries. We never had the frontier, but we had a couple of big wars right here on our territory (my 77-year-old neighbour was telling me just yesterday how he used to run errands for the German anti-aircraft crews stationed 500 feet from where we were standing: his Mom did their laundry in return for some of their rations). I guess that we kind of took a collective decision that a bit of peace was worth paying some taxes and being a little less competitive.
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