I get an improbably huge (for the US) five weeks of vacation, plus a week of Continuing Medical Education. I informed my boss before I started that I would be taking all of it every year, and that if it’s going to be one of those wink-nudge situations where I get five weeks of vacation but I’m expected to not take more than two, he needed to let me know so I could look elsewhere. It hasn’t been a problem.
This is also why I insisted on a straight salary rather than a base salary plus bonus structure. I might have made more money, but most docs on the bonus find that they have to work through most of their vacation to get much out of the bonus, so employers will offer enormous amounts of vacation knowing very well the doc won’t take it. (They usually require a week or two, but if you ask me, doing this job for 50 or 51 weeks a year without a break is a great way to hate yourself, your life, and your job at age 35.)
Then again, not too many people have any leverage to dictate how their vacation will go; most people are pretty damn happy to be working at all. Until the work force becomes an employee’s market–which is not likely anytime soon–it certainly isn’t going to get any better.
As for sick time, a friend of mine once suggested that if you have five sick days a year, you are entitled to miss the five days out of that year when you feel the worst, even if it’s a sniffle. I can’t say I’ve ever met an employer who would agree with that. I have no problem with set sick days as long as they accumulate; if I come in when I’m not 100% one year and don’t use any of my sick days, and then I have ten days the next year when I can’t get out of bed, that needs to average out.
I’m in Canada, and I have a pretty generous employer when it comes to benefits.
My vacation/sick days/etc are:
Paid vacation = 3 weeks per year, after 1 year. 4 weeks after 2 years. 5 weeks after seven years. Cannot roll over from year to year.
General Illness (paid sick days) = 12 days per year, can accumulate to a maximum of 105 days. If you’re sick for an extended time, your accumulated General Illness days would be full-salary short-term disability, before long-term disability kicks in.
PTO = 1 paid day off per month. Can accumulate up to 3 days at a time, then they have to be used.
Civic holidays = 12 per year. (New Year’ Day, Alberta Family Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Alberta Heritage Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day).
So, assuming I use all the available time off/sick time and don’t accumulate any to roll into the next year, I currently get 56 paid days off per year (8 weeks).
The best places I’ve worked for had the policy that if you’re sick, or your family is sick, stay home until you are ready to devote 100% of your workday to work. Coming in sick and spreading germs, is irresponsible. Coming in but being anxious, cranky and spending half your time on the phone checking on Johnny’s fever or Sally’s convulsions or your husband’s post-operative condition is not productive. Go home. If it’s for several days, you may be asked to bring in a doctor’s note. If it’s chronic, you may be asked whether you are really in a position to be in the work force, and it may be suggested that you take disability or family leave.
This attitude is a win-win situation. You get more productivity out of the workers. No one feels obligated to use up their last 2 days of permitted sick leave in December. When you do need them to put in extra time, they are appreciative of the fact that they were not given a hassle about taking the week off when Joe was in the hospital.
My last employer had the policy that one was allowed a certain number of “occurrences” of illness. An occurence was one or more days out due to illness. So if you got the stomach flu on Tuesday, you might just as well stay out the rest of the week even if you’re fine on Wednesday morning, because it counts as one occurrence whether it’s one day or four. After 5 *consecutive * days you needed a doctor’s note.
I guess I get a pretty good benefit package from work.
Six corporate holidays (New Years, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas).
22 days of PTO, which is used for either sick time or vacation time. Can roll over up to 40 days from one year to the next (this year I rolled over about 30 days).
3 'floating holidays. Identical to PTO, except that they cannot carry over from one year to the next. So basically you use your first 3 days off as your floating holidays before you tap into your PTO.
You’re also allowed to purchase up to an additional 5 days of PTO per year, and have the cost of those days deducted from your paychecks over the course of the year. I’ve never done this, however.
When you leave the company, all unused PTO is cashed out at your current salary rate and it is added to your final paycheck. So now all I have to do is find a new job (for a significant salary increase in all likelyhood), and I’ll not only have a higher salary, I’ll also get about 6 weeks of pay from my old employer as a parting gift.
Honestly, I’d like to cash out about 10 days of my accrued PTO and use the money to pay down some debts and/or finance a vacation, but unfortunately that’s not allowed.
I’ve never had to take much sick time. The one exception was last fall, when I missed 6 working days in a row. (I got sick on a Saturday morning, so it could have been more). Luckily it wasn’t in the middle of an ‘end-of-project-deathmarch’, but even if it had been, there would have been no way I could have come to work, as I was sleeping about 22 hours a day and could barely see straight when I was awake. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it, as I did make it a point to call in before I missed my first day of work. My boss called on about the 3rd day, but after talking to me on the phone for 5 minutes he could tell that I was in no shape to work (I was pretty hopped up on painkillers and antibiotics, so I’m sure I wasn’t coherant). Heck, he didn’t even care that I wasn’t worth very much for the first two days when I did return to work.
Many posters are accusing the management of their companies, but I’ve this theory (based almost exclusively on what I read on this board, so take it with a handful of salt) that it’s as much the workers’ fault. It seems to me that there’s a culture of “indispensability” (is this a word?) in the US. Even in this short thread, there were two or three people stating they were indispensable. Managers apparently also think their employees are indispensable. Somehow, the company, or the world, or the world will collapse if a worker is away for a week.
I just don’t buy it. As the saying goes “cemetaries are filled with indispensable people”. As mentionned, in Europe, people get way more vacation time. They go away for one month, and… nothing happens. The company is still around when they come back. Indispensable people are IMO extremely rare, and when it actually happens that someone is absolutely required, it’s generally due to an unexpected and unforeseable crisis. And even then, it’s generally not the ordinary joe who’s required (I’ve seen one case in my life when the presence of a bunch of ordinary joes was absolutely required, vacations suspended, etc… for two months and there was a really, really good reason for this).
If an organization larger than a handful of persons is unable to handle an employee, or a manager, going on vacation, or an unexpected illness, then this organization is seriously flawed. It means there’s no cross-training, no planification, no back-up plan, nothing. Or…or actually, the organization can handle it perfectly, but nobody is willing to admit to it nor the workers, nor the management, for some reason. Pride? Feeling that the employee is redundant if the company can get by without him? A too strong work culture making people (colleagues, managers…) becoming hostile to an employee/coworker taking vacations/sick days and using the “indispensable” excuse to convey their hostility/despise (“if you take vacation time, you’re not someone we can take seriously”)?
Once again, this opinion is purely based on what I read on this board. Of course I could be completely off-base, but this perceived cultural peculiarity crossed my mind a number of times in the past while reading some thread or another. There’s some “the world will collapse if I’m not in my office” feeling to the american work culture, as filtered through the SDMB.
Sorry Anaamika and others for getting the terms wrong/lost in translation.
What I meant is there are nine public holidays (Bank Holidays) where everything is closed and we don’t have to work yet get paid. Things like Christmas, St. Patrick’s day etc. People who do have to work usually get some kind of overtime pay.
The twenty others days are paid leave (you call it “vacation” as I have now have figured out) which I can take whenever I want. Well not quite whenever, there are a few restrictions but they don’t make it impossible for me to take them. Unlike what Cunctator we do have to use them or lose then within the year as they don’t carry over to the next year and we will not get paid for them either.
So now it’s not quite as rosy but still pretty good compared to what some of you are getting.
Two things from the thread I’d like to address:
1: Europeans get more time off.
Looking at Pookah’s post, I get nearly two weeks more off annually, plus my company is pretty good about having people take their time. I’m in management; I get the same amount of time off as partners, unless they’ve worked here for more than 15 years. Below me, they get one week less. This is combined sick leave/vacation time though. The last firm I worked for didn’t do combined times, but if it were combined, it would equal. I prefer combined, as I usually don’t take 10 sick days a year. This is happening in GD too, where people discuss the European model. Europe is made up of many countries with many differing policies. People who discuss the European model should really be more specific.
2: Indispensable.
Went through a two year period working for a hedge fund where I was indispensable and I hated it. I could count the number of non-weekend days I was off on my fingers (including stock market holidays). There was no one else who could do my job (literally), and when the fund returns soured and the bonuses dried up (not my fault, as I wasn’t a trader or portfolio manager), I gave a nice, long notice period (no burning bridges behind me…you keep running into the same people here over and over in this industry), helped trained my replacement, and found a job where they had some depth and overlapping coverage.
In comparing the U.S. to Europe…we have European facilities…and a flood of requests from those facilities to come work in the U.S. as expats or for citizenship. One of my best friends moved from Ireland, another from Holland. Both find the workplace here to have advantages and disadvantages - and it varies depending on which country they came from. Neither complains about more vacation over there, but at my company it does balance out after years of service in the U.S. - which did come with them. So they maybe lost five days of vacation, but made it up in bigger paychecks, lower taxes, lower cost of living, and a more relaxed working environment.
Then of course, won’t somebody think of the contractors?
I’m an evil contractor at a financial firm. I’ve been here a year. We’ve hired about 10 people into the group as Full Time employees, all in India.
I get no benefits, no paid time off, no holiday pay.
I do get a slightly larger paycheck though, and do get paid for every hour I work. (no overtime rate though, that’s still straight time).
Remember, it could be worse! I’d be happy to stay here longer if they’d make me an FTE, but, alas, once Mrs. Butler’s Cobra coverage runs out, it’s more than likely I’ll be forced to find another position… too bad, as they’ll lose a good trained employee.
I used to work for a newspaper in Hungary for 2 years before striking out on my own and freelancing. For each of those two years, I was allotted twenty-five vacation days (this was my first job out of college. How awesome was that?), on top of 9 public holidays, for a total of 34 days off per year. I have no idea how many sick days I had, as nobody seemed to keep track.