In the US, worker treatment is basically a supply-and-demand thing, with very limited legal protections for the workers (compared to other developed countries).
In any job anywhere, there is no real upper limit to how well workers can be treated (except money), but many countries have more legal protections at the lower end. We have much fewer, and the ones we do have were hard-won by unions decades ago and haven’t gotten much better or kept up with modern needs like dual-income households or childcare.
Here, in-demand white-collar jobs (those having more employers than workers) will command high wages and absurdly cushy working conditions — exemplified by tech workers in the first dotcom boom and then again during COVID. That of course leads to more workers who want those jobs, then eventually a glut, mass layoffs and salary cuts, like happened to those same people after COVID. At my last US job, we had kegerators in the office, people would disappear for hours at a time and nobody would question it, my coworkers were watching video game streams while working, and to reward all of this hard work, the company took us out for a half-day ATV ride at the end of the week. Then a few weeks later, economic priorities above shifted and nearly the entire office was unceremoniously laid off. It’s a boom-and-bust mindset that’s good for capitalists at the top but not so much for the worker drones; the money is fungible and can be directed around as needed, but workers have no stability.
At the blue collar level, the situation is even worse, since everyone is even more readily replaceable, and many of the workers lack some combination of education, legal/regulatory knowledge, time, professional communication training, or financial resources to really fight for their rights, even in the instances that they actually have rights (e.g. state-level protections). Immigration status is another big one, especially now.
Having healthcare by default, a norm in the developed world of which we are no longer a part, is huge too… workers elsewhere aren’t generally enslaved to their employers for not just their livelihoods but their very lives.
It gives workers much less bargaining power when any risk they take can lead to the sudden loss of their health and lives, and their whole family’s too. And if you try to change that, even supposedly protected union organizing activities are often trespassed upon knowingly, especially whenever a Republican is in power and the NLRB is run by puppets. Most workers, especially those seeking union protections, don’t have the legal knowhow and long-term financial resources to fight back legally. By design, our whole country is designed to make capital accumulation easier and encourage wealth at the top at the expense of those who don’t (and often can’t) have any.
Anecdotally, I’d agree that Western Europe does seem quite a lot nicer. My ex from Finland had months of vacation time each year, mostly worked from home, had legal protections for being on call, etc. On her psychiatrist’s advice, she decided to take a few months of sick leave to deal with depression, and the state paid for it. Work didn’t bat an eye and just wished her well. (Ironically, she was also less happy than most American worker slaves I’ve known…)
In France and Italy, strikes and general strikes are pretty much a monthly celebration, and long vacations are normal and expected.
And at my previous American companies (all in software), there was a general culture of extensive mid-management and micro-management. Frequent meetings, reports, etc. Clocking-in rules differed from place to place, but generally speaking, taking 2-3 hours for lunch is fine, but nobody would think of disappearing for a whole month without extensive discussion first (unless you’re at a FAANG, maybe).
Now I work for an European company, after being unable to find work in the US for several months. One of my colleagues wanted to take the month off (with 2 days’ notice), and we were just like “Ok cool, see you in a month!”. People also routinely take chunks of time time out of the day to be with their children or to go for a long walk. I also haven’t had a 1-on-1 meeting with my bosses in several years. It weirds me out as an American; I am used to working much longer days on much tighter schedules; there, the work-life balance and their families are more important than anything at the job. Pay is 30% less than what I made in the US, but the overall culture is much healthier and people are happier. Ironically, I have more US holidays off now that I work for an European company, and more PTO days (from day 1) than I ever acrrued as a US worker. I don’t know if anyone is actually keeping track… I do my job, and the rest is just based on trust.
By contrast, from family members who’ve worked there, the Japanese work culture really is brutal, especially for foreigners (they’re really racist there towards anyone non-Japanese, extremely sexist towards women in professional settings, and extremely hierarchical and traditionalist). Even for the Japanese, the salaryman culture has led to a dating, marriage, and birthrate crisis, with many of their workers not having any time, money, or social skills necessary to meet a spouse and start a family. They’re now developing robots to help care for the elderly instead.
China has the 996 system: a norm where some workers are expected to work from 9am to 9pm, 6 hours a day, 72 hours a week.
Then there’s places like the Congo, where children mine for cobalt for use in consumer electronics: 'Cobalt Red' describes the 'horror show' of mining the element in the DRC : Goats and Soda : NPR
There’s also plenty of documentaries and vlogs on YouTube about working conditions in the world’s textiles industries. I’m sure many of them would happily trade places with a US worker who’s complaining about having worked a 60-hour week.
Western Europe is lucky in having a mix of affluence, human rights, and humanist/pro-labor values. But much of those are changing too and probably can’t last long, both in terms of their rightward swings politically and in terms of their less competitive economies.
If you’re in the top 10%, the US is likely to be very nice. If you’re in the bottom 10% anywhere, it’s going to suck. If you’re in the middle 80%, it’s hard to beat Western/Northern Europe and maybe the Commonwealth.
Most of us don’t get a choice, though. We’re just born into whatever we’re born into and most other countries wouldn’t want us.