Day 2708 (Wednesday) 6th November 2024

This is Castel beach in Nice

and this is Saint Paul de Vence. 

Working in France: The French job vocab you need to know

A France Travail employee works on a computer at one of France's national employment agencies France Travail in Dammarie les Lys, northern France, on April 23, 2024. (Photo by Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)

French working life comes with a whole glossary of work terms (and acronyms) that you never learned at language school. Here's what you need to know.

Here is the journey through work life  - from unemployment, to finding a job, enjoying the perks, then losing your job. 

Emploi

Well, we may as well start easy. Emploi, as you may have guessed, means "employment". French newspapers will often have their own "Emploi" sections if you want to read up on the latest employment news.

Pôle emploi (now 'France Travail')

With employment comes unemployment, which typically leads people to France's national job centre - known as the Pôle emploi. They recently changed their name to France Travail, but many people will still refer to them as Pôle emploi.

RSA - Revenue de solidarité active

This is France's basic form of job seekers allowance and you may be able to claim it while you look for work, although there are various and varied conditions.

CV

Yes, you'll need one of these in French. Don't be tempted to put resumé at the top. This is a pesky false friend.

Entretien d'embauche

If your CV is good enough then it should lead to a job interview  - an "entretien d'embauche" or just an entretien. Fingers crossed. 

Contrat de travail

Got the job? Well done. Now you'd better sign your employment contract, known in France as a "contrat de travail". This is a hugely important piece of paper, and is often needed when moving into a new house, applying for a bank account (or indeed a bank loan). 

CDI

If you're lucky, the paper that you sign will be CDI contract, which stands for "Contrat à Durée Indeterminée" – or an open-ended contract. This essentially means you are a permanent employee. Well done. 

CDD

The other (more likely) option is that you're on a CDD (Contrat à Durée Determinée), or a fixed-term contract. This is just a temporary gig, but can be extended, two or three times. It may eventually turn into a CDI if it works out well.

There are other types of job contracts on offer that depending on your line of work could see you end up a pigiste (shifter), an intermittent (occasional worker often employed in arts scene) or a saisonnier (a seasonal worker might do a ski season or wine harvest).

SMIC

Time to talk pay. France's minimum wage, known as SMIC, is €11.65 as of 2024, or €1,766.92 a month (pre-tax).

Salariés

Employees. 

Cadres

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the "cadres" - these are the managers, the executives. These lucky ones get better salaries and better social protection if they're made redundant. Although they will have paid more into the system so it's all fair.

Auto-entrepreneur

Another possibility is to run your own business, of course. Keep in mind that you will have to work with URSAFF - the administrators who collect social security contributions that fund a large part of France’s labyrinthine social security system, including, notably, health insurance.

Ticket restos

Time to talk perks. "Tickets restos" or luncheon vouchers are mandatory in offices with no on-site cafeteria or self-service kitchen. Managers and workers split the cost 50/50, and employees end up with vouchers they can use in most supermarkets and restaurants around the country. 

RTT  

Bosses must compensate you, in most jobs, for working more than 35 hours per week, and if you do so you should be entitled to RTT days (Réduction du Temps de Travail).

These are in addition to your usual paid holidays and are part of the reason why French workers are often able to take the whole of August off. In theory employers who don’t give you this time off should have to pay you overtime. 

Convention collectif 

Most jobs are also covered by conventions collectif, which are collective bargaining agreements struck between employee representatives and companies, sectors or even whole professions, and these often include extra benefits such as more holiday, extended maternity leave or overtime payments.

Treizième mois

Some businesses offer a "thirteenth month" of pay - an end-of-year bonus of sorts - often in a bid to boost staff retention.

Comité d'enterprise

This is a kind of council in some companies that offers you anything from cheap cinema tickets, holiday discounts and a nice wad of vouchers to spend at Christmas. 

Impôts sur le revenue

Oh, the famous French taxman. No, it's not all laughter and perks in the French work place. Be ready for the income tax.

L'impôt à la source

France has a simplified tax system this year which allows income tax to be automatically at source (à la source) rather than the following year after the individual annual declarations.

Fiche de paie

France's payslips are notoriously complicated, but they are important.

Payslips in France are used for more than simply confirming your salary, they are a way of proving your income and you may be asked to supply your last three months' payslips (also called bulletin de paie) for several events such as renting a new home or applying for a visa or residency permit, so it's important that you have a complete set of payslips.

Mutuelle 

This is a top up health insurance that, depending on the size of your company, is normally offered to you automatically. It basically means that your everyday health costs in France, like going to a doctor the huge the prescription they normally give you, will all be covered.

Métro, boulot, dodo

This phrase - literally "subway, work, and sleepy time" - is a great little phrase that means "The rat race".

Basically, you're living to work. Perhaps time to make things interesting?

Augmentation de salaire

Not happy with your salary? Then why not ask for a pay rise, or an "augmentation de salaire"?

Licenciements

Hopefully you won't hear this word in your company, but if you do it spells bad news. It means lay offs or redundancies.

Rupture du contrat

Oops. Perhaps you weren't worth the pay raise, huh? Well, time to get started on the termination of your contract, or the "rupture du contrat". 

Rupture conventionelle

This is a termination of employment that is mutually agreed upon by employer and employee. Both parties can benefit from the arrangement, as the employer can escape labour law requirements while the employee can benefit from unemployment benefits. 

Pot de départ

This is what you'll have if you leave on good terms. Pot de départ means leaving drink.

Chomeur

Now you're an unemployed person, you are known as a "chomeur". 

Chomage

And unemployment itself is known as "chomage", which is also the term to refer to the benefits. You can qualify as long as you lost your job involuntarily (except for the 'rupture conventionnelle') or your CDD ended.

New legal changes have meant that the abandon de poste - or workers who may have stopped showing up to their jobs, with hopes of qualifying for unemployment benefits afterwards  - will no longer be able to do so because of the presumption of a voluntary resignation.

If you lost your job and you were in France on a visa or residency card related to your work status, then you will be able to renew that status as long as you have rights to chomage. 

Allocations chômage

In France, these are generally quite generous - worked out using a rather complicated formula that gives job-seekers around 57 percent of average salary during their last 12 months of work.

Time to start again with the whole process. Bon courage.