I still remember how utterly flabberghasted my mom was when watching “Who’s the boss?” series several years back. The characters had spent many episodes talking about the upcoming special family vacation … which then turned out to be an extended weekend! in a mountain cabin somewhere; and then, when Tony turned off Angelas mobile phone, she got fired for that. For us, that’s bizzarro-world: a special family vacation is two or maybe three weeks with the kids in Italy, France, Spain, Mallorca, Greece, Yugoslavia etc. Mountain cabins are for normal weekends (or North sea for the north germans - a three hour drive at the most).
And it would be illegal to fire somebody without proper cause, and impossible to do it on the spot. A normal bank person like Angela in the show not being on call with her mobile during a vacation is not proper cause. (People like technicans or doctors where their job descirption ist that they have to be on call is different; and even then they pass the job mobile on towards whoever’s covering them during their vacation.
That’s the advantage of having mandatory vacation time - I know that I have to take them, or otherwise my employer would get into legal trouble. I do try, of course, to take my colleagues into account when scheduling, to listen to when they want to travel, and I don’t take more than three weeks off at one time. I know that my colleagues will have to cover my work, but since everbody has vacation, I also cover for them, too. Not being a teamplayer would be somebody who goes at the busiest time of the year or on a bridge day, when everybody wants to go, without asking the others. With bridge days or things like Christmas holidays, we also try to rotate, so if Person Smith covered Christmas last year, he gets first pick at Christmas this year. Or if Smith covered the first two bridge days this year, he can take the next two.
To be fair, the writers must have been exagerrating for comic effect. To the average American, a big/special family vacation probably means a week or two, something like the National Lampoon ‘Vacation’ movies.
The vast majority of Americans do not have on-call jobs, and like you, I am baffled as to why a normal bank person might be required to take calls.
Also, firing is not taken quite so lightly in many businesses here, especially not in white collar jobs (unskilled labor is another story entirely). While many (most?) states have ‘at will’ employment, which allows for instantaneous firing without cause, most employers do not do it that way. The fear of a potential wrongful termination lawsuit causes many workplaces to build a case for firing over time by giving official reprimands and such instead of resorting to the big stick for a single offence. Also, many employers choose to fire underperforming workers in a ‘no fault’ way, paying severance money or continuing benefits for a while and giving a neutral or positive reference.
The kind of ugly firings that screw the worker tend to be mass lay-offs caused by factors out of the workers’s hands, instead of the single, worker performance-based ones which appear in pop culture more than in everyday life.
A disconnect here is this: I don’t even have to be pondering what to do with the time I’d have if I didn’t have to work. I KNOW because it’s the same as the hobbies I currently do in my existing free time. I like my job, certainly, but I don’t see any need to consider it an essential part of my life and in fact the main reason I like it is that I get to play with expensive stuff that I’d buy as toys for myself anyway in the dream world where I’m a billionaire playboy. But if I had a few million just kicking around? I’d trim my hours to the bare minimum in a heartbeat–working for someone else will never even be in the top twenty-five things I WANT to do.
72 hours a week. Take away commute time, for me at least, and it’s closer to 64. Meals make it 56. And how many more little requirements of daily life until you’re really getting closer to only having about 30-40 hours of that time to spend on your true passions and hobbies? To me, that’s not what I want out of life.
I think the real issue with vacation time in America is being unable to use it. Not only do we get less of it, we tend to get the evil eye if we’re so bold as to actually try and cash it in.
When I quit working retail (I was running a sunglass store, so it’s not like we needed a manager on duty all the time for emergencies or anything) I had four weeks of unused vacation time.
Now I work at a law firm, doing much more important work, and I know I could actually leave if I needed to. I’m saving my time at the moment in anticipation of taking a very crappy honeymoon after I get married next May.
FTR, I get 1 1/4 vacation days per month worked. New hires get 1 day per month worked until the end of their first year. After 5 years, we get bumped to 1 1/2, after 10 to 2, and so on. We also get the 10 Federal holidays off, plus the day after Thanksgiving, and occasionally other holidays at random- basically, when the managing partner feels like it. This year we were closed on Good Friday, for example.
Attitudes really seem to be very much different on both employer and employee sides on both sides of the pond.
One other thing that might be different might be practices on overtime. I often read references on the SDMB to wanting and needing overtime, for the extra pay. (concerning those employees who do get paid overtime as opposed to being expected to work unpaid overtime).
Here in Germany at least since the 1990s most large corporations have struck agreements on time accounts with their worker councils - overtime does’t get paid out as overtime pay like it used to before, but added to an employee’s time account. The people in large companies that I have talked with here often have accounts that e.g. can go up to 200 hours into the black and 200 hours into the red (I work in a small company myself and my time account is limited to 50 hours). In the long run most overtime is paid out as undertime in slack months (extra vacation days or shorter hours). Employers like it because employees work longer when there is a lot of work without the employer paying an overtime premium, and workers like it because they get more free time.
Another US here: 11 holidays, 2 personal days, unlimited sick, and 2 weeks vacation. No Carry overs. + 24hr on call every other month (unpaid) with 2-3 calls per week on average and usually things that could have waited until the morning.
One problem with this is that with the personal and vacation it can be denied and is denied about 75% of the time. Its almost impossible to get more than two days off in a row however, so no meaningful vacations. And if I need time off during an oncall period then I have to exchange on call time with my backup.
If you are in the US and are not exempt your employeer is required to justfully compensate you for all on call hours. Keep track of you hours, on call time and when you leave get a lawyer.