Yes we have. You are wrong. Our manufacturing base has dropped about 40 percent.
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/aug/11/00007/ Here is an article from your peeps, the Conservatives are aware of the manufacturing shrinkage.
If you don’t think people never getting even a couple weeks off a year is a problem, I don’t expect to convince you of it here. I think all we can do is agree to disagree.
Yes, I believe two weeks’ paid vacation a year ought to be mandated, just like the 40-hour week (which, IMHO, needs to be strengthened so that it once again applies to all but a very affluent stratum of workers).
Ditto maybe 5 days of sick leave. People get sick, and you really don’t want them feeling like they have to work anyway and share their germs with everyone else in the workplace.
I think 2 weeks’ vacation is a sufficient legal minimum. Above that, I’d be fine with letting employers figure out just how much vacation to give, just the way employers can decide how much to pay employees over the minimum wage. A lot of employers feel the need to maintain at least a modest separation between what they’re paying their grunts, and what the minimum wage is. The same thing might well happen with vacation time.
Wow. So manufacturing dropped from 25% of the economy in the 70s to 12% today. And you’re right, that’s a decline of 50%!
Except, no it isn’t. Because what has happened isn’t that manufacturing hasn’t crumbled, instead the other sectors have increased faster than manufacturing.
Think about it for a moment. This is simple math.
If in 1970 you make 20 dollars from manufacturing and 80 dollars from other things, that means 20% of your income is from manufacturing.
Now in 2011 you make 30 inflation adjusted dollars from manufacturing and 170 dollars from other things, that means only 15% of your income is from manufacturing, even though your manufacturing income has grown by 50%.
Could you quote the part of the link that supports that claim? I couldn’t find it.
What I found were statements that manufacturing has shrunk as a fraction of GDP (which doesn’t mean manufacturing has shrunk, just that the services sector has grown faster). that the proportion of our manufactured goods we get from overseas has increased since the 1970s (which is no surprise, since international trade has grown enormously since then), and similar claims that do not in any way contradict Lemur’s statement that we’re manufacturing more stuff than ever, but with fewer workers.
First you ask if having more vacation time will hurt America’s competitiveness and are told that we have much less vacation time than manufacturing giants like Germany, then you say well that may be true but benefits come as a package and vacation time alone is not the issue, so I point out that benefits as a whole are better in Europe and now you don’t want to place a judgement on the relative value of them. So exactly what is your point then?
As to my benefits, they are pretty good for an American but much worse than those of a person starting a job in Europe.
So who pays for benefits? The same people who pay the extra cost of having safety standards for miners, and people getting overtime, and getting breaks during the day, and having machines with guards to make sure workers don’t lose fingers, and not allowing minors to work long hours for low pay, and not locking women inside a building so they die in a fire.
We had laissez faire capitalism, it didn’t work. It’d be nice if you free marketers could point to even one single country in which your crackpot ideas have worked.
Except which companies out there aren’t allowing their employees to have vacations and sick days? I agree that it’s bad employment practice to refuse to allow your employees to take sick days or vacation. And this is why you’ll have to search far and wide to find a company that will fire you for taking a sick day or a vacation.
Whether time off is paid or unpaid is just an accounting trick. It’s just paternalism to mandate paid vacation, because that just means your weekly pay is reduced by 3/52nds to cover the two weeks of vacation and 5 sick days you’re getting paid but not working. Since lots of people are bad at math and bad at savings it’s probably justified paternalism.
There are no federal laws requiring private employers to give any holiday at all. I have at one point or another worked on every federal holiday. “Federal holidays” are days that the federal government is closed and, thus, (most) federal employees get those days off. That’s all.
I don’t think vacation should be mandated, but I do think that the option to buy as much vacation time as you wish (within reasonable limits) should be in place. You get the stinkeye for taking LWOP from a lot of employers, but some let you buy extra, no problem. I think that some measure of stigma-eliminating is due, kind of like the FMLA.
Probably the dollar value of an average employee’s benefits package is much larger in the US, because in most of Europe the employer doesn’t provide health insurance. Americans pay about twice as much for health care as Europeans. About half of that is via private insurance, and the other half is via public insurance. So if we provided European-style public insurance for everyone we could do so for about the same amount of taxes we already pay for medicare and medicaid and so on.
You’re right. This crackpot American economic system has been a mess from the start. I don’t know how Mexico can handle all the Americans flooding across the border. :rolleyes:
What you fail to understand is that you can’t cherry pick the best of all benefits from around the world, give them to American workers (or those of any state) and hope to have those workers remain competitive.
I’d like to have the salary of a CEO, the commissions of a realtor, the time off of a part time teacher and the job security of a government employee, but that job doesn’t exist. Neither can you have the best health care, and the most vacation, and the highest salary, and the most job security.
Look at it this way. If you think that the American worker is more or less competitive with European workers now, don’t you think that doubling (or more) their vacation time will make them less competitive? How will this loss of productivity be made up?
It’s a little confusing when comparing because many countries in Europe have a per-employee payroll tax that is used to fund things like social services, but your point remains that if we had European style healthcare we could provide everyone with healthcare coverage at the same or less than we are paying now.
You mean the system we have in place that mandates overtime, safety, and other worker benefits? Yeah, that works pretty well. Don’t understand why you guys want to destroy it though.
I agree with you that our CEOs need to stop demanding that so we can remain competitive. It’s shocking really.
I think the real question is how Germany can remain competitive with the workers’ benefits it has. Productivity is not directly tied to hours worked, particularly with the new sorts of jobs that are being created. I think the United States could benefit from people traveling more and seeing what sorts of issues face consumers in other countries and even in the US. Trying to parallel park a car in the streets of NY or San Francisco is a lot different than pulling into a spot in a mall in the suburbs of Detroit, so a car with less overhang and a tighter turning radius is more important.
So much for a thoughful discussion of the OPs question.