Brit's Holiday vs. USA's Vacation

Factual Questions
22

A couple examples of typical leave for a professional job in the US. I’ve been looking for a new job, so these are a couple actual examples. I’m a software engineer, but the policy is the same for anyone working in the company full-time.

Place #1:

15 days Paid Time Off (ie, “vacation”) the first year
20 days after you work there 6 years
25 days after you work there 12 years
At year end, you can either carry over days you didn’t use, or opt to be paid for them

9 Holidays (this is Christmas, Fourth of July, etc)

6 “Sick Occurrences” - this was the odd one, I’ve never seen it before. If you’re sick for 3 days, that’s 1 “sick occurrence.” They said “don’t get sick one day, think you’re better and come in the next, then realize you’re wrong and stay home the next day because that would be 2 sick occurrences.” Nice policy, but not typical.

Place #2:

11 vacation days the first year
14 days the second - 4th year
19 days starting on your 5th year

6 Holidays

2 “floating holidays” - essentially like vacation days, not sure why they break them out

5 sick days

Aside from the holidays, the HR guy told me all the other days (vacation, sick, floating holidays) were treated the same. You could schedule sick days, for example, and take them as part of a vacation. They didn’t care, they just had them broken out for accounting purposes.

The big change nowadays as opposed to 10 years ago is the starting vacation - most places used to be 2 weeks for the first few years, maybe going to 3 weeks after 3 or 5 years. Most of the places I’ve looked at either start at 2 weeks and go to 3 weeks really fast, or start right at 3 weeks or more. That’s nice - I usually end up negotiating an extra week if they offer less than 3 to begin with.

23

Back to the OP, there are many similar examples where the same word is used differently in the two cultures, such as *fanny *and knock up. I would imagine that their origins and why they’re different in the US and England would be lost to the sands of time.

24

It’s also worth noting that not all allowed leave is paid leave. For example, in the US, FMLA requires (most) employers to allow (most) employees to take up to 12 weeks for medical leave for themselves or to care for their families. But it doesn’t have to be paid: all FMLA does is require them to hold your job. This comes up most often with maternity leave: for the most part, it’s entirely unpaid in the US except for whatever other vacation/sick leave you might have stored up. This, plus the couple months pay in copays/deductables you are likely to rack up makes having a baby very expensive, and explains why American women work up until their contractions start, often schedule inductions, and go back to work when their infants are six weeks old.

25

At least here in southern Ontario, “vacation” and “holiday” are two somewhat separate concepts.

Holiday generally refers to a period of time in which one is excused from school or work because of there being a commonly agreed upon date for such things, like Christmas, Canada Day, Thanksgiving, etc.

Vacation is two things; agreed upon leave from work (I get 18 days of paid vacation per year) or the act of travelling to a destination for the purpose of enetertainment (we’re taking a vacation to Florida.)