This scares me. Given the money to pursue my (many) hobbies, I could fill DECADES with all the non-work things I want to do before I die. I really don’t grok the attitude that leads to “nothing to do!” boredom.
Thanks! 
Usually, STD and LTD are insurance policies. They are often provided by a private insurance company, though some companies self-insure their STD and/or LTD policies. You can find the terms and conditions of your STD and LTD policies in your own records (you should have got details when you started work) or from your HR office–such things as when they kick in and the amount they pay can differ from policy to policy and from company to company. But the terms and conditions specific to you and your company would be stated somewhere.
To the best of my knowledge, however, any applicable government programs work separately from these policies (Worker’s Comp, for example). But I’m not sure. If you’re concerned, it wouldn’t hurt to check.
I am late to this party, and have not read all the way down the thread, but …
The norm? What are you talking about?
That could have been phrased better. I should have specified that it is normal for this type of employee, in this business. Whereas a similarly situated employee in Germany (according to the one man I talked to) is compensated handsomely for on-call work.
Also, I should point out that my employer would argue that our salaries take on-call work into account, and therefore we are compensated for it.
Does anybody see any downside to more vacation, rather than less? Martian invasion, cats and dogs playing together, collapse of civilization? Anything?
I get a 40 hours a year vacation, plus the normal holidays. I didn’t use my vacation last year, so it’s lost. I already used mine this year, so no vacation for me!
When I got out of the Navy, I sold back 60 days of vacation, took the last week off, and still lost 7 days. 2 1/2 years of vacation I never took!
I’m slavery…ooops I mean salary…so I take 1/2 days when I can to compensate for the long days. It works out OK, but I do wish I had more vacation.
Exactly. After 15 years with my company, I get 160.16 hours per year of paid time off. This includes any time I take for vacation, illness, taking my mother-in-law to the doctor, etc. We also get 8 holidays a year. However, between our fiscal closes, software release schedules and a bunch of other stupid stuff, it’s not easy to schedule more than a day or two off at a time, so I end up leaving the time on the books. The gotcha there is, after a certain point, PTO time ceases to accrue and I’ve just lost that vacation time.
I once took 3 weeks off and I had something like 8,000 emails waiting for me.
Oh, and we (exempt employees) are also not compensated for being on call.
To get back to the nitty gritty of the OP, it is clear and certain that should America adopt any more, even one, of European cultural norms, that very day America will become the next nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
I like cheese, I prefer capitulation to fighting, I am a (somewhat) hairless primate…
Oh shit, the terrorists have won.
Well obviously there’s a trade-off between amount of vacation and productivity. A country which mandated 100 days vacation for all employees would not, I suspect, have a booming economy. At that point, I suspect voters would favour less vacation.
But maybe when you get down to more realistic numbers like the ~10 to ~30 days a year that we seem to be discussing here, the upper end of that range is optimal. The stats do seem to suggest that the American way leads to higher productivity and higher mean incomes (not so sure about median incomes), but is it a better way to live?
How is productivity calculated? I would assume it output per man-hour, which might mean a well-rested and healthier work force would be more productive. OTOH, a calculation of output per worker would almost certainly favor peole working more total hours.
I touched on that earlier but it seemed to pass everyone by.
You’ve all got me on ignore haven’t you, you bastards? 
Certainly a happy, non-embittered worker who has not lost the will to live will do as good a job (if not better) as a dissatisfied one, regardless of what a widgets per man-hour calculation says.
Is this kind of industrial revolution productivity measurement all that useful outside of manufacturing? In a modern-day office, most people do work as it comes in (putting out fires as necessary) and work on long-term projects so as to finish them close to the deadline. If today you have more to do in less time, you just grind it out or work through lunch. As several people have pointed out, work piles up while you are away, yet you somehow always get it done, in addition to new work, once you come back.
I’m really not convinced that there would be any justification for lowering salaries in exchange for more days off, if the same items were taken care of when they needed to be.
I believe they call it project management.
Holidays are planned for.
To complete the figures given on page and clarify the German colleagues remarks:
Germany: 1. By federal vacation law (Bundesurlaubsgesetz) every full time employee has a minimum of 24 work days as paid vacation. In many branches specific union contracts (Tarifverträge) are the norm which give more days off, and that’s fine, but the employer is not allowed to go below that.
Full-time is usually around 40 hours/week, though in some branches, they have lowered it to 35 hours/week; in other areas, it’s been raised to 42 hrs/week (which I think is the maximum that’s bearable).
Part-time employees get their vacation calculated by percentage of full-time they work.
If you start in the middle of the year, they calculate how many months this year you will work, and apply that fraction to the whole year vacation, that’s what you get in the first incomplete year. During the first 6 months of a new employment = try out time, employers usually have a vacation ban. (Since this time should be spent seeing if employer and employee fit well and can do the work and like the place, taking long time off would be counterproductive).
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Holidays. Those vary from state to state, with Bavarians (hah!) getting most (a lot of them are Church holidays from tradtion, so the Catholic-dominated states get the better deal).
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Sick leave. That’s seperate, and thus, doesn’t really count, because you stay in bed when sick and can’t calculate before how many days you will be sick. You will get paid, of course, either by the employer or by the Health insurance (depending on length). For this, your doctor will give you a certificate that you are indeed sick and for how long he estimates till you recover. One copy goes to the employer, one copy to the Health insurance.
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Maternity leave, that applies to fathers, too. Correctly called Erziehungsurlaub = education time or Elternzeit = parent time. It usually refers to either the first 1 1/2 , maximum first 3 years, after a child is born, and can be taken by either parent, or shared (the mom stays home the first half, the dad the second half). This is different from the “protection of pregnant mothers period” 6 weeks before birth and 8 weeks after birth for the mother to recover from the birth.
The parent/education time, by contrast, is intended for the parents to form a bond to the child - which is why it’s a good sign that slowly the men are taking it, too, though still only a minority, and to encourage women to become mothers, because they know they can come back to their old work place after the time is up, and they get paid a percentage of the old pay during it. They can also work a maximum of 30 hrs/week, so to slowly ease part-time back into work. Since it’s a special kind of leave from work, they can also go to trainings etc. to stay current.
The state did this on purpose to encourage people to have children, and for the mothers to come back to work later, because too many women don’t want to decide between either profession or children.
oh, to add to point 1: seniority in a company doesn’t play a role, but biological age plays a role - the older employees get a few days more to recover. Also, handicapped employees get more days.
The reductions are due to the Global Financial Meltdown ™ aren’t they?
One thing to remember here as well is that there is EU law. I seem to remember the UK not being happy as all junior doctors had to work much less hours due to the law, whereas previously they worked insane amounts.
The stories of those employees who “live” at the workplace and force the others to stay long and get little vacation reminds me of the stories of Japan, and the reality behind those long work hours: it was simply against the social code for employees to leave earlier while the boss was still working, but the productivty can’t be kept up for 12 hours or more, so everybody sat around surfing the net or reading comics, while the (Western) boss worked. (When he took a stroll around the block, everybody had gone, and he could work in peace - everybody hanging around bothered him).
So I don’t think the US would collapse, but I think it unlikely that it would get through. Our employers would love to get rid of holidays and slash vacation, but everybody else thinks that we work to live and not the other way.
I, too, hate the trend that because a few people on the upper end of the bell curve can work faster or longer than everybody else, the managers get into a tizzy and demand the same of every normal person, even when they simply aren’t capable of that performance.
It would be stupid to require everybody to have an IQ of 130, so why demand everybody to work 10 hrs. instead of 8? But then, managers seem to love dumb ideas the more, the dumber they are.
Not at all. The unions pushed for the free Saturdays back in the 50s (with the poster of a little kid and the slogan: Samstags gehört Vati mir = Saturday Dad belongs to me), back from teh reduction of 48 and 49 hr/weeks after the war.
The metal industry union pushed for the 35 hrs down from 40 during the mid-80s, with the pay staying the same, of course.
Other branches experimented with it during that time, too. The car industry, during earlier recession times, along with politicans, argued about the best way to react to crisis both with cries of “less work hours” (and less pay) for less work, and “longer work hours” (for the same pay, meaning reduced hourly wage) to help the companies. Of course, not in every crisis every industry has less volume of work, so the best approach is an individual one.
Fair enough. My girlfriend’s sister’s husband recently had his hours reduced in Germany due to the crisis. He said it was happening a lot over there. I was just wondering if it was that you were referring to.
That’s still going on…the maximum hours for junior doctors has only recently been reduced to 48 hours, from 56.