This much history tells us. The French are an idle shower of ludicrous, pontificating poseurs who, when not on holiday or on strike or at the doctors demanding suppositories for imaginary illnesses, are trying to philosophise work out of existence to leave more time for eating and adultery. Meanwhile, the world passes them by.

Such stereotypes have been the jambon-beurre of foreign correspondents in France (bread and butter not being fancy enough for the French) since Julius Caesar dashed off his conquest of Gaul, and never fail to raise a smile at the English breakfast table. So when a brash American, who looks he's built from the tractor tyres his company makes, is invited to France to take over a failing factory and tells us that the cliche is not just true – but that the French are even more workshy and bolshie than previously thought – we cannot but laugh, while making a mental note never to invite him over for dinner lest he takes against the decor or does unspeakable things to the cat.

"Three-hour days! Long lunches! Workers trying to have a say!" we laugh, half in envy that this imaginary communist paradise of plenty still exists. But it is just that, imaginary. The flâneurs at the Goodyear plant in Amiens – or the "so called workers", as the Titan Tire boss, Morry Taylor, calls them – work just three hours because they are on short time due to the caprices of global capitalism. There's a worldwide glut of tyres.

Taylor – a former Republican US presidential hopeful with a record of sacking workers who join unions and of obstructing inspectors investigating accidents at his plants – insists the "French don't want to work". But the opposite is the case.

The most popular work-related internet site in France is not Google or Facebook but the Pole d'emploi, France's online Job Centre where being unemployed has been turned into a full-time job. Hours of Kafkaesque clicking to pointless dead-end pages must be done to prove you are not doing anything else. Unemployment in Amiens is at 45%.

With little work to be had, people pass their 20s and early 30s in one unpaid stage (work placement) after the next. I did a quick survey of friends' and neighbours' families and found 11 young people and three men in their 40s and 50s on this merry-go-round. One guy was on his fifth unpaid stage, making it hard to argue with the ubiquitous Parisian anarchist graffiti: Travail = Exploitation (Work = Exploitation).

It's true that the French are more questioning of many things — work included — and by some reckonings the British work much longer (150 to 177 hours more a year). Yet other surveys have the Germans working even less. And if it was about hours alone ,the Greeks would be top of the European efficiency table, which is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, survey after survey shows French workers are among the most productive in the world, ahead even of the Germans and far more efficient than the British or the slacker Swiss, yet they are also among the unhappiest and worst-managed. I have seen more than enough of the spirit-sapping martinet stupidity of French management to confirm the confessions of corporate slacker Corinne Maier's Bonjour Paresse (Hello laziness!), where she entertains homicidal feelings towards her bosses — a feeling apparently shared by up to 20% of the workforce.

To most French managers, motivation and empowerment are ideas from Mars. France's big problem is not with its workers (whose work ethic is often higher than both Germans or Brits, some surveys show), but in the way they are led and organised.

Yet the idea of the workshy French is just too good a cliche to let go – and we fall for it every time a communist shop steward sets himself up like Obelix outside a factory gate. Yes, they are a bolshie lot who you wouldn't want to be stuck next to on a long TGV ride – but that is what makes them such fearful negotiators, even faced with as ruthless a multinational as Titan. Thousands of viable French jobs have been saved like this from becoming collateral damage in global games of market domination. Whether those at Amiens can be is debatable, but who else is looking out for les petites gens? Certainly not Morry Taylor or his kind, whatever he says when he runs for president in 2016.

• This article was amended on 25 February 2013. Pole d'emploi is not the most visited website in France, as the fifth paragraph originally stated, but the most popular work-related site and its description has been changed to reflect this.