Don't forget various bureaucrats mainly employed by state. Those are often folks who go to massive strikes that cripple economy since they are losing many of those cozy benefits they take for granted, while taking everybody including foreign tourists as hostages.

I can tell you from personal experience those are hardly breaking a sweat, and few colleagues who actually live there sometimes end up in proper Catch-22-esque situations with things like taxes or driving license changes. good stories to laugh at but proper nightmare to actually go through.

Another topic might be that nobody wants to hire french manual workers, for things like home renovation, unless you have no other option. Little work, long breaks, often way too narrow specialization and often very high prices makes even french people looking for folks from places like Portugal or even Romania. And the costs themselves are only small part of the reasons.

But same colleagues tell me that in software companies people do often work hard. Long are gone generous 2-hour lunch breaks. Seems like a great divide depending how safe ones work feel.