Well, as you know featherlou, I too am in Calgary. As I noted above, I work a 35 hour work week, get 4 weeks paid vacation and get an additional 10 days at Christmas.
I’m not complaining about nuthin! 
Glad I don’t work in America!
I work 40 hours per week (nut only paid for 35)
25 days annual vacation
8 public holidays
Properly signed off sick leave is 12 weeks full pay.
Non-doctor approved sick days is 10 days a year on full pay.
I’m never off sick though.
nut?
I mean ‘but’
Hmm… for my weekday job, I come in at 10 and leave at about 9 on average, so that’s 55 hours/week.
Then on the weekends, my wedding work eats up an average of 9 hours, for a total of 64.
With 2 weeks vacation, that comes out to 3200 hours a year.
And the last vacation I took was whe I was hopitalized for three weeks last year.
You’d think I’d learn…
This explains the funny looks I got when I was America recently for just over three weeks.
American: So how long you guys here for?
Arch Trout: Just over three weeks.
American: Great. You guys are students?
Arch Trout: No, we all work
American: 
I thought they asked because I looked young, obviously it’s because Americans just aren’t used to anyone taking 3 weeks off work in one go.
It is very common here (in my experience) for people to not take more than a weeks vacation at a time.
alice, your Calgary work experience is much different than mine. 10 days off at Christmas? With pay? I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that (most jobs, I was lucky to get Boxing Day off).
If your job can do without you for three weeks, it can do without you. 
Yeppers. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I really have no business complaining about my job. Ever. At all. For any reason. Not even when one of the faculty on the floor sprayed dilute hydrochloric acid up my skirt. (Hey - I left early - HE certainly wasn’t going to bust me for it.)
Ooops - posted too soon.
I wanted to add that one of my girlfriends works at PetroCanada and her benefit package, including days off at X-mas and holidays is very similar to mine. She does work a 40 hour work week though.
Oil & Gas is indeed a different ballgame than most employment here. I’m probably just bitter because I don’t work at an O&G company with benefits coming out the wazoo. (Although I am sub-contracting for O&G, and the money is sweet indeed.)
BIIIG Money! NOOO whammys! 
Nah, that’s what contract workers are for. One way of boosting that ‘jobless recovery’ dontcha know.
Hey, I finally got around to reading last week Maclean’s, and they have a blurb that according to Stats Can, people in Alberta work 400 hours more each year than the average person in Newfoundland or BC.
(continuing the “working in Alberta” hijack - please kick us out if we’re hijacking too much, shijinn)
I wasn’t here for the “Crash of the 80’s” (I think that’s when it was), but apparently there were LOTS of whammys then. But for now, with oil over $50 per barrel, I’ll keep taking the crumbs from that overloaded table.
Barbarian, that’s pretty interesting. It seems like people are working a lot here, but that sort of proves it.
nono featherlou, go ahead. i don’t see hijacks as a bad thing.
maybe more people from europe or elsewhere will want to take the poll?
First of all, I’d like to show the statistics of the average Japanese person (in my own experience, YMMV):
Working base: 2080 hours
16 National Holidays: -128 hours
Average extra paid (company holiday etc.) : -8 hours
Yearly paid vacation : -96 hours
Total : 1848 hours
Sounds low, but then you have to factor in that the average Japanese person also puts in on average 2.5 hours of overtime every day. (And that’s calculating conservatively, IMO)
Overtime : +625 hours
Grand Total : 2473 hours.
My own figures on the other hand, are slightly less disturbing…
Working base: 1950 hours (yes, I have a 37.5 hour work week)
16 National Holidays : -120 hours
Extra paid holiday : -7.5 hours
Vacation : -90 hours (12 days this year, increase to 14 next year)
Overtime : 0 (why bother?)
Total : 1732.5 hours
Yesss… Feels good!
That bears out with what one of my Japanese friends once told me–he said they got so many freaking holidays there that sometimes they’d be at home and have no idea why they had the time off.
At my current job we have…4 holidays off, I believe. Thanksgiving, 4th of July, New Year’s and Christmas. If the calendar is kind to us (ie, the holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday), we might be given another day off and get a 4 day weekend. Usually not, though.
Of course, even when I do have vacation time built up I hardly ever take it until I’m in imminent danger of running out because I’m neurotic about work attendance. Things have a tendency to fall apart when I’m not around. I can’t fathom taking two or three weeks at a time–I’d come back and find my cubicle a smouldering crater.
Yep. Not only does Japan probably have the most National Holidays in the world (if anyone has any info to the contrary, let me know and I’m moving there but they also have the unique practice of moving the holiday to a weekday, if it were to occur on a Saturday or Sunday! That means that every single National Holiday results in a paid day off!