-10 paid holidays per year-Christmas, Independence Day, etc.
-10 days paid vacation at hiring, which increases to 15 days at 3 years, and 20 days at 10 years
-3 paid sick days
-3 paid personal days
They make a big deal of pointing out that sick and personal days cannot be used as vacation and employees who are ‘caught’ doing so will be in Big Unspecified Trouble.
In contrast, a German fellow with a nearly identical job in a similarly sized German company recently told me that he had two months (40 work days) vacation + holidays + some enormous amount of sick leave. He added that when his kid was born a few years ago, he was given additional paid parernity(?) leave. Most amazing (to me) was the revelation that last year after being ‘on-call’ for two months, he asked for and was given an additional month (20 work days) of vacation as compensation, even though he readily pointed out that he never had to do any work outside of office hours. On this side of the pond, year-round uncompensated on-call is the norm.
Now, some of this may have been BS showing-off to impress the backward American, but he seemed to be telling the truth.
25 days/year minimum is the law here in Sweden. I get 30 as there is a certain expectation that I’ll do a certain amount of extra work here and there. Public holidays (of which there are 10-12ish are additional to that).
I have no idea how this “40 hours of sick leave a year” thing works. We just seem to have a different system. Off sick we’re not paid for the first day. After that and up to two weeks you get 80% of your pay. After that it is something like 80% up to a certain limit for six months. To be honest I’m not really sure, I just find it bizarre that people bring things like allowable sick leave into a discussion about holiday time. Maybe that’s just a side effect of having, in general, a low holiday allowance.
Regarding productivity, I think the important thing to keep in mind when talking hour is show much of that is considered effective. Productivity is not exactly the same as being in the office. The argument goes that a happy employee will work more effectively.
Over here being expected to do uncompensated on-call generally means you’ll start looking for another job. One works to live, not lives to work. Out of work time is precious.
I agree with you about work-life balance. I was just a bit surprised by how much an industry norm differs between the two places.
It seems that nobody has pointed out any real downsides to the typical western European model of time of vs. the typical US one. I certainly can’t find any. European products are well-regarded, good science comes out of European universities, social and economic problems don’t seem any worse.
So, why don’t we get more vacation here? The vast majority of people do not have a ‘live to work’ mindset. It is clear that businessess and the economy in general can do just fine with more time off. What’s the deal?
I have worked for the same company in several places around the world and here are 3 experiences of different ‘vacation’ entitlement:
European location One - 1 day of vacation earned ever 7 days = 52 days a year max. However if you were on vacation you didn’t earn that vacation day that week.
European location Two - 2.08 days per month earned plus various public holidays plus another random 10 days (2 weeks) to take to compensate for the fact I work unpaid overtime plus an addition 5 days awarded in July due to my seniority plus my ‘random’ days next year may go up depending on how many non work days I work this year = almost 40 days off this year
US location - I earned 5 hours a pay check (10 hours a month) plus 2 personal days. Which did not add up to much at all when I wanted to come back to Europe to go home and see the folks!
Are you kiddin’ me? According to the powers that be our work ethic is in shambles because so many of us DON’T have a ‘live to work’ attitude. Remember the eighties? Remember when everyone was screaming that the Japanese were beating us economically and it was all our fault because we weren’t working hard enough? Now, with telecommuting and blackberries and whatnot we can work from home too! Work, work, work, work, work, that’s all that we’re good for, according to the people that run things, and my god, you want to ask for MORE time off? What for? What are you, one of those European wusses that wants the the boss to take care of you with all sorts of perks on my tax dollars?? Get back to work, hippie.
I’ve even heard some folks around me claim they wouldn’t even know what to do with extra vacation days. Jesus, talk about Stockholm Syndrome.
After a certain point, and esp. since our kids were born, time has always been more valuable than money to me. In my current job, I started out with 10 days of vacation a year, IIRC, although I also got another 8 or so paid holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, etc.). Now, after just over seven years, I’m up to 27 days of vacation a year, and very happy to have 'em.
As for sick time my place of work is very lenient. We are pretty much allowed as much as needed. Since my daughter started daycare I probably average 5-10 sick days a year (fully paid) for when either I’m sick or my daughter is too sick to go to daycare.
At my place of employment if you need to miss anything more than 5 days straight, they will probably ask for a note from your Dr.
If you have to be off for more than 10 straight days you may have to go on Short Term Disability (STD). When this happens I believe your pay cheques come from the government, not the corporation and is something like 85% of your usual salary.
If you are off for months or years you go on Long Term Disability (LTD). I believe this is 60% of your usual salary.
As another note my company has something called “flex time”. Basically if I choose to work an extra 45 minutes a day I can take a day off (with pay) every 2 weeks. This is great when you don’t have many holidays banked-up and you want a few extra days a year off.
On this side of the pond uncompensated on-call is against the law. The National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) defines on-call as any time the employee is restricted in what he does in case he is called into work as being “on-call”. If you have to be able to respond in a derton time of any call, if you go to a party and can not drink because you may be called you are being restricted.
The NLRB requires the employeer to justfuly compensate the employee for all hours on-call. They do not define what the just compensation will be. The state of California’s labor board has determined that it should be not less than the state mim. wage.
By union contract I get 1/2 time pay for every hour that I am on call. So I like on call pay.
When I worked for Macy’s between vacation and holidays I got 6 weeks every year. I also had 20 years service. A new employee then would get 2 wks after one, 3 after 5, plus 9 holidays.
My present job I am getting 2 weeks and 7 fixed holidays and 2 floating holidays. I wish I had asked for a bump of one week before I took this job. I take one week with my wife as vacation. In the summer I take 8 days off 3 unpaid to volunteer at a music festable in Monterey. Before I could also take long week ends away, work as a youth worker and go with the kids to summer camp.
Walking in the door at a Las Vegas hotel/casino, I get 2 paid holidays per year, 10 “flex” days per year (a term used to avoid the legal responsibility of paying out someone’s vacation time when they are fired or quit), no paid sick days, no paid personal days. After a year I’ll earn “flex” time about 10% faster. There are lots of restrictions for applying to use your flex time, and in probably 50% of cases the flex time is denied.
And as far as not being compensated for being on call, not happening! I am on call roughly once every 5 weeks. When I carry that pager I get paid 1 hour for every 6 hours of carrying the pager outside of business hours. So on weekends I’m on call 24 hours a day, the day I get the pager 8.25 hours and the other 4 days for 16.5 hours. I have to be sober, respond to a page within 30 minutes and be within 1 hour of the office.
If I get paged and fix the issue over the phone I get paid a minimum of 3 hours straight time. If I have to go into work I get paid a minimum of 3 hours at time and a half.
If I’m not on call and I get called for support the above rates apply. But it’s a “best effort” situation. If I’ve had a few drinks, I won’t do support. If I’m on vacation I probably won’t offer any support (and if I do, I will make the company compensate me rather handsomely!).
I do carry my Blackberry pretty much everywhere I go, and I will answer or send the odd email after hours (much to my wife’s chagrin) without any compensation. However I do use my Blackberry for personal calls as well (not many, maybe 30-40 minutes a month) so I figure it all works out in the wash.
US Work experience 1: 19 days paid vacation AND sick/personal leave per year. No extra payment for on-call status, as technically under the employment contract terms we weren’t restricted–but it was clear that means would be found to fire someone who wasn’t within 30min of the office when on call.
US Work experience 2: 20 days paid vacation, unlimited paid sick time with doctor’s note or other documentation of reason for unexpected absence. Notably, also expected 60+ hour weeks from salaried personnel. No compensation for on-call time here either.
Current Job: I’ve been here less than a year. I get two days off per month, for a total of 24 a year. At 5 years that goes to 30 days, and at 10 years that goes to 36. Sick time comes out of that bank as well.
I have a family business that I’ve worked at for 20 years. In all that time nobody that works here (12 employees) has taken more than a week of vacation during a year. Several years I didn’t even take that. We work at least 40 hours every week, and only take off 7 holidays per year. I really don’t know what I’d do for 45 days a year with no work. I’ll bet I’m not all that unusual in the USA.
That’s what I mean. Around this office, maybe 1 in 10 people have that crazy live at the office attitude. They are universally men in their 50’s and 60’s, who use work as an excuse, IMO, to ‘hide out’ from their wife and kids, who they don’t seem to like very much or have anything in common with. The other 90% of us don’t understand why we can’t get an amount of vacation that would be considered normal in other, equally prosperous countries. They would get the same amount of work out of the employee because between the Blackberry and remote login, we already do our jobs while on vacation as it is.
ETA
Mosier, that sucks.
There are profitable casinos in Europe, right? They presumably give more vacation time than the ones in Vegas. So why can’t Vegas casinos give employees more time off and remain profitable?
Unfortuately at some point in U.S. history living to work became some sort of virute. All of us sane people who feel otherwise have had to deal with the afteraffects of the race to the bottom brought on by idiots who bought into it.
Why would that be the case? Even on my laziest days at home I’m getting up and moving around more than I would be if I was at work. And I’m certainly not doing any physical exercise here in the office, which I’d probably be doing on vacation days, especially during the summer.
After 12 years with my company, I get 12 days selective vacation. This plus the standard 12 company holidays (Xmas, Labor day, et al) and 10 sick days isn’t too bad. New hires only get 5 days selective though.
After 12 years, I get 168.22 hours per year (yes we’re a computer company) plus the normal holidays plus an extra four days or paid as we shut down between Christmas and New Years. But the real issue for Silicon Valley is using them. I just took 3 weeks off (my longest vacation ever) and still have over 100 hours left. Since not everyone goes at the same time, email piles up. The best times are at the end of the year when everyone is off - then it is much easier to relax. If everyone shut down in August, more people would have real vacations.