It depends on the field. In my office it’s fairly common for people to take a two week vacation in the summer, or even longer if they’re going back to India to visit family.
Because it’s a 24/7 job?
In his defense (which I’m reluctant to provide), he is available at all times. There’s never a time when the President can’t be reached, if necessary.
There is a certain culture in some white color jobs in the US that “vacations are for wimps”, and there are lots of people (in my experience) who have such high opinions of themselves that they think the just CAN’T take that much time off all at once. But it depends on the field. Of course these days, one rarely ever gets away completely. Most of us have email and text available even on vacation.
As for how rare it is to take 2 weeks of, I don’t know. But seeing as how this is GD, I’d try to look up some stats before I weighed in. In your Pit thread you said you couldn’t take 2 1/2 weeks off for vacation. Is that because you don’t get that much vacation (including paid holidays), are unable to because your boss won’t let you, or what? I’ve taken vacations that long before. Not every year, but I never felt I couldn’t do so if I wanted to.
But here’s the thing. If we’re going to claim it’s a 24/7 job, then we’re going to have to be careful about what we call a “vacation” since the president travels with a staff and has access to everything he needs to do his job during this time. We will never know exactly how much time he spends working, especially since Trump is a notorious night owl. I don’t think it makes sense to count every day away from the WW as a vacation.
Therefore he doesn’t need to run off to one of his clubs every weekend.
There’s the cost of not only flying AF1 and other planes, there’s all the loading and unloading of the attending airplanes, vehicles, personnel. There’s the disruption to the destination’s streets, traffic and businesses.
Cost of lodging the Secret service at his club(the government is paying Trump to house his security and others).
If he really needs to golf, there’s 3 courses at Andrews. It’s secure and all he needs is a short helicopter flight to get there.
Nobody seems to be able to find a cite for whether a single 17 day vacation is a lot, or not a lot, in the US. I offered my opinion, which I think was pretty clearly labelled as an opinion and not a fact. I understand you have an opinion that it is either not a lot or that there is no way to know the answer, but which I cannot tell. If you think it isn’t a lot, that’s fine, agree to disagree. But I’m starting a poll in IMHO.
I’m not sure about most of us having email and text available on vacation. Sure, I do and you do but that leaves a whole lot of people out. Not just the janitors and retail and food service people, but lots of people who don’t need to be available 24/7, like accountants. I noticed ( not just here) that people really do live in bubbles and almost don’t see the many jobs that operate differently than theirs.
This https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/paid-leave-in-private-industry-over-the-past-20-years.htm has numbers from 2012, but if the average worker with 5 years service in a company has 14 days vacation and one with 10 years has 17, few of them are going to take a single two week vacation in a year. Sure, someone might do it for a special event like a honeymoon or a once in a life-time trip, but most who have three weeks of vacation don’t take two weeks in a lump and leave only five days for the entire rest of the year. Seventeen days makes two consecutive weeks a bit more likely, but how many people spend ten years at the same employer nowadays?
Back to the OP, just as an anecdote, I am in the IT business, so white-collar job with good benefits. I had been in my career for about 14 years before I took a vacation that was longer than a week. That was my honeymoon. After that I realized how important it is that you completely disconnect from your job at least once a year, and since then I have taken at least one two-week vacation every year. I think there are other fields where time off is more frowned upon, especially where you have to bill hours to clients.
The only people I know who take vacations longer than two weeks are people from other countries who save their vacation all year to take three weeks or so to go back to visit their families. Some of these places take more than 24 hours to get to. I am a senior manager now and we always grant these requests given plenty of advance planning and having backups in place.
[QUOTE=Candidate Donald J. Trump]
I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done. I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off. You don’t have time to take time off.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve seen two valid complaints about the Dear President’s vacations.
First, he criticized his predecessor for playing golf and taking vacations, while promising to do neither once he became president. Pure hypocrisy.
Second, his vacations are largely (entirely?) spent at his own commercial properties. He’s getting his salary and also collecting rent.
Of course, he’s not breaking any laws or regulations with either of these, but I’d like to think the President of the United States should be held to a standard higher than “it’s not illegal”. It used to be that the Republican Party advocated personal integrity, but that’s apparently not a concept the GOP leader is familiar with.
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My current employer starts out giving two weeks of personal time off (combination of vacation and sick time), increasing by one week for every five years worked. And it’s required to use all your personal time. Not only can you not carryover extra time, any leftover time is subtracted from your future time. And managers can get in trouble if they hassle employees about taking time off.
Good info. I would not have questioned the claim that “most Americans don’t take 2 1/2 weeks vacation all at once”, but the claim was that it w as “rare”. I also asked to clarify what “rare” meant, because to me it means “single digits, percentage-wise”. Most of my experience is in Silicon Valley, so it’s probably not typical of the US. Some companies offer a sabbatical every 5-10 years where you are expected to take an extended leave from work.
Also, note that it’s common for presidents to take time off in August-- the dead, slow-news time in DC with Congress in recess. Obama spent time on Martha’s Vineyard most (every?) years in August. Bush 43, of course, spent days and days and days at his Crawford, TX ranch.
In the software industry there seems to be an unwritten norm that foreign-born employees are entitled to take a 3-week vacation blocks, because home is so far away that a 2-week trip just isn’t worth it. This applies whether US citizen, green-card, or H1B contractor. Meanwhile, native citizens get the stinkeye if we take more than 2 weeks in a row.
To be clear, I wish everyone had more time off. But everyone should work under the same rules. If they can leave me to pick up their slack for 3 weeks, everyone should get to do the same. Or, if I can negotiate for bargain-basement pay in exchange for loads of guaranteed extra vacation, I should have that right as well.
if you ignore holidays I don’t even have 17 vacation days period.
I think it’s a lot considering he’s only been on the job for 6-7 months. I don’t think two-week vacations are rare for people in white-collar jobs, but typically only after they’ve been with the company a few years. Ten or 11 days might be all a new hire gets the first few years and they won’t want to blow it all in one go and not have anything for emergencies or sick time. They might also have to wait for the days to accumulate throughout the year so won’t even have access to their full allotment less than a year on the job.
Moderator Action
While the typical vacation benefit for Americans is certainly factual enough, the fact that this is about the President naturally leads to a lot of political implications regarding the question. The office of President of the United States is also not exactly a typical job position, and the question of how much vacation time is appropriate for that position is certainly more of a matter of opinion than fact.
As a result, I think this thread will do better in IMHO, so let’s move it there (from GQ).
My first question was whether it was 17 weekdays off or 11 weekdays and 6 weekend days, so I looked it up and it’s the latter. He took last Friday off (1 day) and will be off for two full weeks (10 days), which covers three weekends (6 days). He’ll be back Monday the 21st. This isn’t highly uncommon. For most people, this is just a two week vacation plus leaving a day early.
That said, I agree about why he is being criticized. It’s because he criticized Obama for taking vacations, specifically criticized him for a 17 day vacation, and also said if he were president he wouldn’t have time for golf. But he’s gone above and beyond simple hypocrisy. If the numbers I read are correct, he’s already spent, I think, 59 days out of town at golf courses or Trump property and his travel expenses in his first year alone are projected to be more than over the entire 8 years of Obama’s presidency.
So it’s not like he’s being criticized just for taking as much time off as Obama, he’s being criticized for being a hypocrite 8 times over.
Another thing that probably doesn’t help is that when he goes to a golf course on the weekend he tweets that he’s working hard while his press office says he’s holding meetings and working and won’t have time to play golf. Then photos surface of him playing golf. Even my right wing friends hate that.
In my personal experience, getting 17 days off all together would usually be next to impossible. The workload never permitted it and I didn’t have or want the luxury of working while on vacation. Most of my working years, my vacation time was taken in dribs and drabs over the course of the year, since we couldn’t afford to go anywhere anyway.
My dad never took off more than a week at a time in all the years he worked.
In my limited anecdotal experience, a week of was typical, 2 weeks was much rarer, but not unheard-of. More than that, I never encountered personally.
Among the people I know it would be a lot. Most of my friends tend to break things into 1-2 days off work/long weekends and that sort of thing. I’m one of the few people I know who take off and leave home for a week or more at a time.
As mentioned above, 2 weeks is 16 days in a row, counting both weekends. Add one extra Friday or Monday and you’ve got 17.
We typically take one 2 week vacation a year but I like to work in a 3-day weekend in the mix so I use up less vacation time. In my 20’s I took a 6 week and 7 week vacation by saving up time for two years and working with my boss in advance to make sure it would be OK.
In my anecdotal experience, I started with two weeks paid vacation from day 1 (available after 6 months in) and now get four weeks paid vacation per year. I often take two weeks at a time in a year. However I have hardly ever taken more than two weeks, because I don’t want work to find out that they can actually get along without me. 
I have more vacation available than I know what to do with. Right now, I have just under two months banked.
At 196 days into the presidency, Obama spent 21 nights away from the White House in non-official capacity (4 in Chicago and 17 at Camp David), and George W. Bush spent 67 nights away (4 to Kennebunkport, 6 to his ranch, 39 at Camp David). By comparison, Trump will have spent 41 nights away (25 at Mar-a-Lago, 14 to New Jersey, 2 at Camp David). So Trump isn’t breaking records so far in terms of total vacation days. It should be noted, however, that Camp David is essentially equipped as an alternate to the West Wing, and as such “vacations” there are essentially working days in a retreat setting to caucus with senior advisors and Cabinet members on long range policy planning or other strategic issues away from daily churn. Trump’s vacations, on the other hand, appear to largely be spent golfing and meeting with family and (former) business associates, although it is had to tell because Trump has deliberately excluded press pool members from most of his trips, and press briefings about the President’s activities have been misleading if not outright lies.
Over two full year terms of office, Obama took 217 nights, Bush 553, Clinton 274 and Reagan 335. (Some of Reagan’s days were recuperation from the Hinkley assassination attempt and so weren’t recreation.) For average days per year that works out to about 27, 69, 34, and 42, respectively. If Trump kept up this pace for the remainder of his presidency he’ll be at about 76 days of vacation per year.
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