I love the last article.
Your flag says you are Chinese mrswdk, I will assume it's the same, and that's why you are posting about French laziness.
A small quote from it :
While French workers worry the country's long economic downturn could mean the end of laws banning Sunday trading and enforcing a 35-hour week, Zhang and Chinese immigrants like him are quietly getting ahead the old-fashioned way - 11 hours a day, six days a week.
Well, you want to say we are lazy, and you want to keep working 11hours a day 6 days a week, while French people work 35 hours a week, 5 days a week.
BE MY GUEST.You think we are lazy, truth is we enjoy our lives much more than you Chinese do. I have no problem with you calling me lazy, I pity Chinese way of life. I truly do.
Remember me how much holiday do you have a year ? What a joke.
Btw, your 2nd article is a piece of shit written by a total liberal capitalist mind spreading serious bullshit of how things work in France - allow me not to share his view on how the world has to work.
1st article you quote it but probably didn't read it :
‘France has a reputation for having lazy workers’More than a decade after it was introduced, the 35-hour workweek still projects an image of France as being one of the most laid-back places in the world to work. In most of the rest of the euro zone, the 40-hour workweek is standard. But in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 per cent higher than the euro zone average.
Our productivity is higher than the average in euro zone, productivity being, imho, much more relevant that hours "worked" if you wanna speak about laziness.
If you read the article, it's actually saying that we got the reputation of being lazy, but we aren't, and then it only talk about the 35h hours a week rules in France.-
So, reputation are a joke, very far from reality.
Finally, speaking about your example in the OP. As djelebert tried to tell you, the first 3 paragraph are about the french guy, then the rest of the article, like 90% of it, is about boredom at work in UK, speaking about people from UK. It has nothing to do with french, it's only using the french guy working in UK as an example of how boredom is a problem in UK.