How many hours do you work a day?

I work in France, too. My company is SLACK! No one gets anything done because they're all on coffee/cigarette break 75% of the time. I'm just the token foreign student (a goodwill offering from my government) so I do fuck-all. My repeated requests for work to do have been ignored so now I fool around all day, openly & without shame. We're on flex-time so people come and go as they please. I start around 9 am and leave at 4. Lunch is 45 min but it generally stretches to an hour plus an extra half hour of post-lunch socializing. Are all French companies like this?

which sounds ok until you consider the holidays. so far this year i've taken one day off (went to london zoo, april 24th) out of my entitlement of 27 (22 plus 5 from last year). every time i think about taking time off we are either too busy or are being threatened by redundancy (3 times this year). oh um.

andy

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect - a simple matter of computer keystrokes - and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of deleting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers' time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko's photocopy centers, totaling $56,600, after finding that managers in Ithaca, N.Y., and Hyannis, Mass., had erased time for 13 employees.