The holiday that isn’t

I’ve promised myself for over a week now to write something about lundi Pentecôte or Whit Monday but haven’t really had the guts to tackle it.

The status the day has achieved over the last few years reflects all that is wonderfully maddening and completely confusing about France. It makes absolutely no sense to the French. So what chance does a foreigner have even one living here?

It’s refreshing to see how little impact the Protestant Work Ethic has had here in France. The French are renowned for getting their priorities right (in my book at least) and along with their Mediterranean neighbours tend to work to live rather than the other way round that prevails in normally colder European climes. Yes perhaps I’m stretching a point here and flexing a few clichés, but there’s undoubtedly a hint of the truth.

So how to explain the public holiday that is officially at least no longer. But thereagain it sort of is still a holiday for most people rather than the working day it was meant to become back in 2004.

It’s the French idea of Solidarity. Nothing will become clearer. You have been warned. Reach for the gin now before it’s too late

Up until 2004 all was fine and dandy in the garden of French public holidays. Whit Monday was Whit Monday clear and simple – and nobody worked (just for a change).

The seeds of confusion were sown in 2003 though as the government sought a knee-jerk response to the fatal heatwave in June of that year, which killed more than 11,000 (mainly) elderly people. Some bright spark in Chirac’s government hit on the idea of scrapping Whit Monday as a holiday and replacing it with a Day of Solidarity.

No more public holiday and instead people would work and income generated from that day (estimated at around €2 billion) would boost the (tax) coffers to care for the elderly and handicapped.

Good idea – Right? Only on paper, and perhaps not even on that!

What mustn’t be forgotten is that much of the country’s workforce is already struggling with the 35-hour working week and the requirement to take a certain number of “enforced” days off (RTTs) a year to keep to the letter of the law.

So many bosses saw the new “non holiday” as a chance to oblige employees to use up one of those RTTs and closed for business. Meanwhile others chose to remain open, leaving it to individuals to decide whether they went to work or claimed the day as an RTT (which they were of course entitled to do).

Result? Well after the fiasco of the last two years when for example some schools were open and others closed; a couple of government ministries reported for business as usual but others put up shop for the day, the State finally caved in and gave its own employees the day off.

But it hasn’t helped. This year 60 per cent of the population took the day off and 40 percent struggled to work (public transport of course operates a holiday service). It was hard to guess what would and wouldn’t be open or whether anyone apart from the office cleaner or security guard would be there to answer the number you were calling if you did show up for work.

So much for Solidarity then! And to spice up the mess one loopy Socialist parliamentarian actually called for a strike to demonstrate against a law which required people to lose a day’s (RTT) holiday if their company forced them to take the day off. Don’t think too many people turned up!

And just to sum up this complete idiocy – an anecdote. The centre where Hen works (you know, the one which employs several thousand people – many of them completely incompetent it would seem to destroy/save the planet, depending on how look at things) operates its own bus service for employees – arriving at 09h and leaving at 17h (ON THE DOT). Most commendable!

The centre decided to close on Monday – remember enforced RTT (just checking that you are still following). But somehow, somewhere the day of Solidarity didn’t exactly fit in with the 35-hour working week, which meant that everyone ran the risk of “losing” an hour or “giving up” an hour too many of “Solidarity”. Solution? The buzzer went one hour earlier on the Friday evening and everyone who was bus-bound pootled off at 16h.

I love the French

Forget the tonic, I’ll have the Gordon’s straight – preferably from the bottle.