The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) just reached a tentative agreement with its 20,500-member engineering union, the Society of Professional Engineers in Aerospace (SPEEA). This puts to rest the labor woes that cast a shadow over the company beginning in September. On November 1, Boeing settled a 54 day strike with its 27,000 member machinists union. And today, Boeing looks like it will avert a strike with SPEEA if the parties sign a contract by December 1.

In the negotiations, SPEEA wanted a specific limit on subcontracting engineering work and Boeing wanted to make sure that contract improvements would be affordable if there was a slowdown and that it would have outsourcing flexibility to stay competitive. Boeing initially asked engineers to pay more of their health care costs and for new engineers to accept a 401(k)-style retirement plan rather than the current defined-benefit pension program.

Boeing engineers are well-paid. 13,000 of them in Washington state, Oregon, Utah and California make an average of $88,000 a year, and its 7,000 technical workers average $67,000. But SPEEA wanted more -- 10% annual raises through 2011, more vacation days, higher overtime rates, a restoration of early retiree medical benefits and changes to the health-care and pension plans.

For 16 years I worked directly with French and British portfolio managers advising them on their U.S. stock portfolios. I visited Paris and London on more than 225 separate trips during that period. My mother was born and raised in France, her father, a captain in the French army was killed in World War II. My own father was educated at a French medical school and I had the privilege of spending several summers as a youth in Southern France. Through all this, I learned to adore the country and in another, sense feel sorry for it.

The French way of life is truly embodied in the joie de vivre. The work ethic in France has always been "do your job, but no more," and forget overtime work -- its not the money, its the infringement on free time. A person starts a new job and is instantly granted 5-6 weeks of vacation. The French medical and pension system is among the most generous in the world. My own mother worked exactly for three months in a temporary agency in 1954, left for the United States with my dad, a newly minted physician. She became an American citizen, and yet when she turned 65, she was informed that she qualified for a French pension. She was flabbergasted to learn that the French government was depositing $175 per month in her American checking account . She did not earn a cumulative total of $175 in her three-month temp career! When she inquired she was told that "you are entitled! You were born here!" She felt so guilty that her monthly deposit was immediately given to charity.

The months of July and August are renown for the French vacance -- vacation. I dealt with portfolio managers that took five weeks off in a row, which is great work if you can get it, but no one backed up or watched their portfolios. I remember asking several of them what if there was an emergency on one of the stocks they held? The common response was, it will have to wait.