Strike! We’re going on strike!
After having a week off work (in order to try to finish putting ‘French for Beginners’ onto the computer – no hope there, I’m afraid!) I came back to work to find that we were going on strike.
The new Director General of EuroPig has decided to change our summer holiday arrangements in order to save money.
We get the same 5 weeks a year but he wanted us to have a rota so that each if gets the chance to take some time off in August.
For the French, it is an in-alienable right to have 3 weeks off, each year, in August. At the moment, this means bringing in lots of temps (which costs money).
What the DG proposed was that we take two periods of summer holiday (one of two weeks and one single week) and change those weeks each year.
Whilst this would have worked very well for me, it was a no go idea for my colleagues (most of whom have children – lucky people) and so we went on strike.
At 10:30 am we laid down our tools (or the bits of dead pig we were dealing with) and marched out into the carpark. There, we smoked cigarettes, talked and relaxed.
Finally, the DG came out to talk to us.
We shouted at him and he went back inside.
A few hours later, he came out again and proposed a meeting.
We all went inside, he talked, we shouted and finally, another meeting was proposed.
Eventually, it turned out that we compromised and we are now going to have one three week period each summer but that period will be on a rota (so that it changes each year).
Works OK for me as I like the first three weeks of June (which no-one else likes) and so if I get three weeks in August, I can swap with someone else.
“My first strike”, I said to Denis, afterwards.
“What did you think”, he asked.
“I liked the shouting”, I said.
All the best
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One Response to “Strike! We’re going on strike!”
[...] And, if you like shouty bits, there are some shouty bits in Solidarité where Brooke goes on strike where, from my experience, people tend to stand around shouting a lot, then take two hours off for a nice lunch before standing round and shouting a lot (see my strike experience at Breton Diary.) [...]
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