In many parts of Europe, it’s common for workers to take off weeks at a time, especially during the summer. Envious Americans say it’s time for the U.S. to follow suit.
Some 66% of U.S. workers say companies should adopt extended vacation policies, like a month off in August, in their workplaces, according to a Morning Consult survey of 1,047 U.S. adults.
Approximately 50% of voters will vote for a political party that views any such reform as communism.
It’s actually quite a bit less than 50%, but their votes have a bigger impact because of a broken system.
We’re heading through a dry county, and for political reasons it’s a very long, narrow county. So I cannot serve alcohol until we’re through.
-King of the Hill
So much this. We have an antiquated and ridiculous system that gives the regressives far, far too much of a voice.
Socialism is a very nice son of rationalism. It is time for a review
51% support slower employee response time outside of work hours
Uh, what? That does not compute. Either it’s work, or it is not work (and I don’t respond to anything, and don’t get contacted in the first place)
If you’re a skilled salaried worker the law doesn’t really consider you to have work hours. Furthermore, you aren’t required to be compensated for time you are on-call unless you are required to physically be present.
US labor laws are truly horrifying if you start asking yourself a few “what-ifs.” The entire system is built on good faith.
“Salaried worker” over here means just that you’re being paid for fixed, regular working hours - typically something like 37.5 or 40 hours per week. Anything on top of that is overtime, which needs to be compensated either in time off, or paid out.
On call rules also vary a lot by country, but typical it’s something like being paid 20-25% of your regular hourly wage while on call, with overtime pay when you’re taking a call.
I’ll never forget at my first job once I moved to Europe, boss reminded me to take my vacation days. “Yeah, I’m hourly, not salary, what vacation days?”
Yes, holiday pay/leave is accrued for casual hourly workers too, by law.
That said, when I switched to salary, off in lieu is a sticky loophole, not sure if it was legal but one place would wipe any leftover OIL on 31 Dec with no payout, so it was on you to take it, which wasn’t always possible (pay and time off is better, but work/life balance can be just as F-ed in Europe).
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Yes, holidays can, by law, be reset on Jan 1st.
However, the company needs to have reminded you that it will, and also allow you to actually take the time off.
If you have 30 days on December 1st, then they need to allow you to either take the days forward into the year or take it in December.
We have salary exempt and salary non-exempt in the US. The exempt part being overtime pay.
Salary exempt would be jobs like managers who may have to work outside of normal hours to ensure continuity of the business. Such as making arrangements for sick workers.calling out.
Salary non-exempt are for positions in which they are paid a set work week but their function does not have unplanned work outside of their normal hours. So things like HR or accounting may be paid salary, but there really is no reason for something to come up outside of their work day. These people should be clocking in and out or at least capturing their time in some manner, because if they do end up working greater than 40 hours a week they are entitled to overtime pay.
I work in engineering. Every job I’ve ever had has been overtime exempt. Shit sucks.
I work in IT. I’m exempt too. :(
Then I guess a few companies I’ve worked for are breaking the law… Go figure. Our non exempt employees wouldn’t get overtime, they just worked for free if the were needed to work longer hours… Yay murica… Coincidentally those companies didn’t have their salaried employees clock in or out
Oh yeah. Wage theft accounts for more stolen dollars than any other form of theft.
Where is “over here”?
Pretty much all of the EU, at least - country specific regulations vary, but the basic framework is based on EU regulations.
Yep can confirm everything you stated.
Source: am from Europe
Then don’t vote for Republicans.
30ish percent of Americans identify as Republican (depending on the poll), so these types of questions are always ~66% of Americans in support
But many independent voters who want these policies vote for Republicans. If they want these policies, voting for Republicans will not get them there.
I’ve worked in companies with a presence in various European countries over my career. Whether or not everyone takes Summer leave at the same time very much depends on the company, and the country. I specifically remember working with a Finnish contractor firm who planned to have no billable time available at all in August, from anyone. But our offices in France and elsewhere never fully shut down in August, they were just very lightly staffed. Everyone took some multi-week summer holiday, just not the whole place at once.
It’s not just summer leave, either. There are people all over the world having kids and going out on maternity (or even paternity!) leave for months at a time. When my wife and I had our kids in the US, I didn’t get any extra paternity leave, and just used saved-up PTO. I particularly remember that my wife had to stay in the hospital for a bit after my first kid was born, so the two weeks I had saved up flew by in a flash. I recall my boss strongly encouraging me to dial in to a conference call on that last PTO day, and when I did his boss lashed into me for taking so much time off. I started sending out resumes shortly after.
On the other hand, when the Europeans I worked with later got their summer or parental leave, their Project Managers just dealt with it, and if it meant their schedules had to slip, they slipped, no temper tantrums required. And I think that is the key difference. American bosses and PMs are much more likely to get away with assigning blame for schedule slips downward, perhaps because not as many people are unionized.
Many types of workers in scandinavia is not as heavily unionized either. Perhaps the ones that are not, enjoy a form of herd immunity from worker abuse from the ones that are.
This is exactly why every worker should be supporting unions even if their industry doesn’t have one. Rising tides and all that.
There’s a lot of unionisation. Further, there’s industry-wide collective agreements, which pretty much do the herd immunity thing.
Just an anecdote related to the first part of what you said: I’m in the US, PTO season seems to be December at my company. Both because some portion of people’s PTO hours will expire at the end of the year, and obviously because of being adjacent to Christmas and new year.
Depending on the country, there aren’t that many people in unions. Most countries in the EU (not Europe in general) have laws that protect the workers better than workers in the USA. The result is a different work culture.
Which is often still the result of strong union actions in the past, even if only 20 or 30 % are currently unionised.
Living in EU, mid thirties, full time office job getting about 33 days off per year all together. Max 4 weeks in a row tho, and must match schedules with colleagues so all keeps on running, no full closing of offices. The older you get, the more vacation days you get. Older colleagues complain they have too much holidays…
I’m on the UK and taking paternity leave in December. By using some of my holiday allowance plus a Christmas shutdown I’m turning my 4 week paternity leave into 8 weeks off in total. It’s hardly a holiday (seeing as we’ll be lookin after a newborn and my other half will be recovering from a c-section/childbirth) but god-damn I am looking forward to two months of just focusing on mu family.
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I am truly sorry that you are stuck in this awful situation. The system (or large parts of it) are designed like this. Keeps people in check. As an European, I find it baffling. Not everything is prefect here, far from it. I’m dealing with chronic health issues myself and I probably wouldn’t survive the US.
There is nothing I can do to help you, but I emphasize with your situation and hope, that you can rest soon!
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Probably not what you wanted to hear or see, but this is why managers are there. Exactly why you said the boss of the manager is an ass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnsRU3JJ_rs
34% of Americans responded “grind my body into the ground, capitalism daddy”
I don’t think they even responded, their mouth were probably full.
The other 34% of adults surveyed were middle management.
Or were part of the base so trained as to kneejerk into thinking that sounds like “Communism”.
I know lots of us people with “unlimited time off” type contracts. No one ever takes more than a week because they are afraid that their bosses wouldnt like it.
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I…do not know what’s being said here.
In Germany, you get at least 28 days of holidays per year. Company even has to budget for them, so if you don’t take them, it creates a huge headache for them in regards to finalizing their yearly results because they might have to keep money back. Sorry, I don’t have the correct economical term, in German it is a Rückstellung. So there is a very high insentive to get all of your people to take their holidays, because otherwise it’s a pain in the ass and will delay everything.
Does Germany also have a maximum amount of days an employee can save before they are legally required to take them out?
My company has this and just about everyone I work with utilizes the unlimited time off. Most people land in the 5-6 weeks of vacation a year + sick + personal business + holidays.
There are the few who make work their hobby too, but you can’t do anything for those people IMO
What is the difference to vacation and personal days?
Attending funerals, births etc aren’t really holidays
Exactly, we get days off for this on top
I don’t know about that. Depends on who died…
Depends on where you live, the two European countries that I’ve lived and worked in my employers would allow additional leave for funerals of aunts, uncles, cousins and some even allowed for the death of a pet.
Oh, we have bereavement and paternity/maternity leave.
A lot of the time the difference is in how much notice you need to give work before taking the time off.
Sometimes they are treated different for expirations as well. For example, accrued vacation time usually has to be paid if you leave, might have some or all rollover to the be next year, while other types of time off are more likely use it or lose it
Personal business is for things that need to be done touring business hours but aren’t vacation. Things like doctors appointments, meeting a service person to fix something at your home, or some delivery that requires you be home. Those kind of things
I’ve been told that generally, this is so the company doesn’t have to pay you back for unused PTO if you leave the company.
I can’t vouch for this as true, but it makes sense.
It can be to limit how much vacation time the company has to pay out on separation, or to limit how much “liability” for vacation pay they have on the books at any given time. If your employees get 5 days of vacation a year, use it or lose it, you don’t have to deal with someone who (the horror!) has built up 2 weeks and wants to use it all at once.
There are no state or federal laws that give employees a right to paid vacation time. Only 10 states require the company to pay out unused vacation time when you leave (CA, CO, IL, IN, LA, MA, ME, ND, NE, RI). In most of those states, use it or lose it policies are illegal. Everywhere else, the company policy basically decides if it gets paid out or not.
I have unlimited PTO, and it’s a total scam. I’m a contractor, and contracts have required hours within required time-frames. These time-frames don’t have margin for taking off a couple weeks at a time. Any time you take off, has to be made up, so it’s not really time off
Research shows that people with unlimited time off take fewer days than people with set amount of time off.
I am definitely an outlier here. We have unlimited PTO and 98% of our workforce is in the US so most people never take more than three or four days at a time. And often end up at the end of the year having taken less PTO than they would have as a regular hourly worker.
But not me… I’ll take 3 weeks at a time if I have plans. They can fire me if they want. I have a nice 3 months worth of severance written into my contract if they are the ones who terminate it.
That would give me a month more of break and then 2 months to find a job.
I know this isn’t possible for everyone. But if more people stood up for themselves, even within the confines of these contracts, we would all be better off as management and executive get used to it over time.
That is why time off is supposed to be mandatory
If I’m stuck in the USA, I’m gonna find an unlimited time of job and actually use that benefit like Europeans. Fuck American work culture.
I’m sure you’ll keep that job for several months. The other part of American “work culture” is how quickly and easily we can lose that job. Be happy that you have some worker protection
If you get such a contract, make sure to read it closely. I had it once, phrased more like “there is no policy restricting time off”. It’s really up to your manager and it means there is an invisible limit that may be different for everyone, you won’t know about until you hit it.
In my case, I had a good manager, but sure enough, got dinged after taking off two weeks in the year (the worst part was no actual vacation but individual days off for kid’s appointments). I much prefer an actual limit, because then you can take it
Yeah because it’s a fucking scam who’s primary purpose is to eliminate pto liability from their accounting. It’s the equivalent of the 401k scam that eliminated corporate pension plans as a standard benefit.
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For some that’s true.
But we undergo a great deal of brainwashing. Unions are demonized, billionaires lionized, puritanical (insane) work ethic lauded, anything less than that vilified, etc.
Attempts at unionization are aggressively subverted and crushed by large corpos.
And most people are given just enough to not want to risk it all to get a bit more.
It will be a while, yet, before US culture shifts enough that more people side with unions, join unions, and build critical mass. Although, younger generations seem to be more aware of the anti-labor BS more than my gen (x) was at a similar age.
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Why do 34% of Americans not want paid time off work?
Because they will think of someone else who “doesn’t deserve it” getting it and mald.
Mald?
portmanteau of mad and go bald
be so mad they go bald
That sounds pretty mad!
Something, something socialism is bad.
Realistically, they are probably the small (and large) business owners that will have to pay for a month off work for their employees.
“In 2020, there were a total 5,775,258 U.S. firms in all sectors. They employed about 129,363,644 workers and had total annual payroll of $7.3 trillion.”
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/01/who-owns-americas-businesses.html
US population per that census: 331,449,281.
For simplification, let’s assume one business owner per business. Then it’s only 1.74243% of Americans that own a business. Even with inclusion of additional owners for businesses, you aren’t going to get anywhere near that 34%, as that would be 112,692,756 people.
In short, realistically the 34% are not business owners, and instead are the propagandized proletariat who fight against their own best interest in favor of capital (conservatives and fascists).
This is what you are looking for:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/254085/business-establishments-in-the-us-by-employment-size/
Breakdown of the size/ # employees per business.
There are 4.6 million businesses with 1-4 employees. 8,600 businesses with 1,000+ employees.
Per Google:
“Small businesses employ 61.7 million people in the United States, which is 46.4% of all US employees. This means that almost half of all Americans work at a small business. Small businesses are defined as independent businesses with fewer than 500 employees. They make up 99.9% of all US businesses.”
It’s likely that the average business has a lot more than one owner per business. Most would have multiple shareholders, whether that’s husband and wife businesses, or a small firm of several partners. Plus you also need to add in shareholders, etc. Though it’s also true that one person can own multiple, and presumably the survey didn’t let the same person answer twice, so maybe the 1:1 assumption is ok.
But even so, isn’t that figure super low? Here in New Zealand, we have about 550,000 small businesses (less than 20 employees, including self-employed), which if there were one owner per business would make this 10% of businesses.
I’d also add that people who work in small businesses are also more likely to understand what a fine line there is between them having a job and the business going bust. This is especially true for places like hospitality, where margins are thin and businesses go bankrupt at a high rate. These employees may also think it’s a bad idea, because they know their business can’t afford it even if they are not the owners.
instead are the propagandized proletariat who fight against their own best interest
If you went out on the street and started talking to the average person, I think you’d find that it was difficult to find a person who wasn’t voting against their own interests (other than those that do not vote at all).
some people are that bad of workalohics. never take time off and think others who do are weak
the myth of a meritocracy strikes again
I’m the kind of person that brings my work laptop on vacation and it’s because I love what I do, not because I think people who don’t do that are weak.
Who are the other 34%?? Who is like “yeah idk a consecutive 30 days off every summer actually, legitimately sounds BAD to me”?
European here. Like me, many people from the poorer european countries don’t have any place to go on vacations in august. Everything is expensive and there’s always a rush to booking. For someone who doesn’t have a “family summer house” and can’t afford to rent a place in august, mandatory august vacations (like it’s usual here) is just a waste of vacations. Too hot and no place cool to go. Also, august is typically the month where everything is flooded with small children. If you’re not too fond of that either, then august is really the worst month to be on vacations. ALSO, it’s lovely to work in august, because usually your workplace has AC and most of your colleagues are hundreds of kms away, trying to buy a melted ice-cream for 40min in a crowded beach.
Couldn’t you just stay home and fuck around and just not work?
You missed the part about having AC at work.
Eh I ignored that one because I don’t know how to respond. I live in the south (of the United States) in an attic apartment. With my ac I can’t get it below 80 degrees fahrenheit inside and if I don’t turn the ac on it is well above ambient temperature, 100 plus degrees.
I know that AC should be a luxury but it is quickly becoming a requirement. I don’t know how to help on that front
Uh, lots actually. People who self identify with work, and the shitty management class who are workaholics.
Also, the self employed and small business owner who never gets vacation time.
As a self employed small business owner, “What are weekends and work hours?”
As an employee, “Couple weeks off sounds great!”
Three possibilities. a) people who bought into the propaganda that being exploited by your employer means you’re more dedicated. b) the temporarily embarrassed millionaire effect. They’re willing to take the exploitation on the off chance they might be the one exploiting people in the future. c) they already are the ones exploiting people.
There’s also people that recognize that a “summers off” program like this wouldn’t affect significant portions of the workforce. Retail and dining workers wouldn’t get this time off. Medical workers wouldn’t get this time off. Package handlers wouldn’t get this time off.
The divide between “work-from-home” and “essential” and those who got laid off completely during the pandemic opened a lot of eyes to how unfair different types of employment are. I can see plenty of workers saying they don’t want white collar office jockeys taking yet another advantage that service workers will never have access to.
“sounds like COMMUNISM to me for sure buddy !”
It’s not too surprising that a country that had a civil war over ‘employment laws’ is a bad place to work.
They have dropped that “take a month off” thing like it’s some crazy regular thing that happens.
I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but in the UK you normally get 25 to 30 days of Annual Leave, companies often give extra days for long term or exceptional service, some have salary sacrifice options to buy more. Where I work you can even win some in charity raffles. The expectation is that you book them in advance with your boss when you want to use them.
If you want to save it all and take a month off then so long as the boss is okay with it, then off you go. But you won’t have any leave days for the rest of the year.
That’s double the amount of time off I have here in the U.S.
And I only get a week of paid sick days, which I’ve already used up due to an illness which hasn’t even been properly diagnosed yet.
I even have to make up time if I go to the doctor.
In the UK the government mandates that your employer pay you whats called statutory sick pay for up to 28 week should the illness require it, which is a minimum of £109 a week.
In addition, your continued employment by the company is protected and they cannot fire you for being sick.
In reality the company will often support staff members for much longer if needed. That’s just how things are expected to be. I’ve had a member of my team go on very long term sick with leukemia and he was supported by the company for over 4 years while he was in and out of hospital, letting him work part time and from home when he needed to, at his discretion.
Expectations on companies here and the protections offered to worked in regards to thier employment and unfair dismissal situations puts the “land off the free” to shame
Not surprised. I would honestly move there tomorrow (my father was English and I was born before the 1980s cutoff, so I could get citizenship), but I don’t want to abandon my dogs.
Why not take the dogs with you, if that is „all“?
Well, I don’t know UK law, but generally that means putting the dogs in quarantine for months and I don’t want to do that to them.
Yep - it’s a tired misconception I first encountered working for an American 20 odd years ago.
While it’s true that it’s difficult to get much out of France Spain and especially Italy in august - it’s because it’s holiday season - not because everyone is gone for a whole month
Cool, I get zero sick days and get paid a lump sum “vacation” bonus every year equivalent to one week’s salary.
I get no real paid time off otherwise
Strike
25 days off is 5 weeks (because days off would only be the work days.) That’s over a month.
Most positions in the US seem to give 10 days of annual leave a year. Some may also include sick pay as well.
It’s even more than 5 weeks if you take days off adjacent to bank holidays. One can easily stretch it to 6+ in many countries.
Do you get paid during your month off?
Of course.
In Finland you get paid 1.5x your normal monthly salary in the month you are in vacation. History of it is that to ensure you continue working after the vacation.
Edit: it is not in the law, it is just something that unions have negotiated
Yeah, I’m also from the UK and not sure where tf this “August off” thing is from, whether it’s something other European countries do.
People usually take 1-2 weeks off at a time for a holiday then the odd day here and there, a month is ridiculous.
I was gonna say that you’d burn out if you used up an entire month at once, but I guess Americans would be used to that kind of shit anyway.
Here in Germany taking 3 consecutive weeks off is pretty normal, for me that’s also the maximum that I can take off in a row without jumping through additional administrative hoops. A whole month isn’t normal, but it could certainly be arranged
Same, we have to cover about 4 weeks of closed child care and 6 weeks of closed schools. So we take a bunch of our 30 days and turn them into a 3 week stay somewhere.
Like so many things in the minds of Americans, when they think of social benefits in Europe, they think of Sweden.
In Sweden it is actually not unusual to take 4 full weeks off every year in Summer. Especially if you have kids. Can be even 6 weeks for some years if you still got enough parental leave to take. And that is in addition to time off around Christmas, although then maybe not more than 1 1/2 weeks or so.
Parental leave? Lol
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I don’t think its a Federal requirement to offer employees any vacation or sick leave in the US. For many office jobs you have to earn leave time over the course of months or years - it’s not unheard of to have zero leave time the first six months of employment.
Paid sick leave, no, but your job is protected by FMLA.
It’s only protected by FMLA after you have worked there for a year, because fuck you I guess.
Same in France.
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If you want to save it all and take a month off then so long as the boss is okay with it
Yeah, most bosses aren’t ok with that.
Where I am now I get two consecutive weeks max
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If you think voting will get you out of this, my american friend, you are wrong. You need a revolution.
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I agree with everything that you just said. But revolutions are not led by a single individual, but by organizing collectivelly. I simplified my reply to your original post, and I apologize for that. What I originally meant was that voting will not change anything. You need radical change. And yes, that will shed blood. But houseless people, minorities, they are already bleeding. The alternative is just to vote? To go to marches? Protest?
Nah, organization and fight against capital.
I’m gonna assume the remaining 33% prefer to have a vacation other than summertime.
German here: I have yet to witness these “European-style” vacations mentioned in the post title.
Most workplaces seem to frown at people taking >2 consecutive weeks of vacation, esp. if they don’t have kids and do it in main travel season / during school holidays. Handing in ~3 weeks of holidays often at least needs some kind of explanation to the team-lead, e.g. “I have school kids who have their summer holidays and we need to keep them busy until school starts again.”
I have yet to see a single company going easy on someone saying “I’ll be off all of August KTHXBYE”.
I work in IT for a major telecom provider in Scandinavia, and almost everyone takes 3 weeks summer vacation, mostly at the same time.
Management recommends taking as much as possible over the summer, as we have a 5-6 week “slow period” when people’s 3 weeks don’t align.
Other than that, it’s common to just take the rest during other school holidays.
We get 6 weeks by default and earn our way up to 7 weeks after 5 years.
German here as well - this hasn’t been an issue in any company I’ve worked so far, all didn’t have an issue with 3+ weeks.
I’m glad to hear it’s not an issue in your experience / industry.
My prior gig, all of our EU people took like 3-4 weeks off at a time. Probably industry-related?
in some sectors, like construction, they just all have to take summer holiday together. That’s usually like 2 consecutive weeks.
Most sectors do not tho. Depending on the sector and the specific job, they just set an email autoreply: hi, i’m chilling by the pool rn, if it’s urgent ask colleague x who is a bit informed about what i normally do and they should be able to help you, (we’ll clean up the mess when i’m back)
This is cool info and fills in some gaps I had. Thank you!
Could also be confusing to some as I remember a co-worker (American BTW) that he thought Sweden was part of the EU and that was the reason why the whole country would go on vacation on the month of July for the entirety of the month.
Frankly I think the EU should name itself the United States of Eurasia and just be America 2 But This Time More European but then I also use inches so wtf do I know.
You guys have a lot of countries.
less than you guys have states.
Yes but they’re all America (uh… In theory) so we can all just pretend it’s one which is good, because a lot of us can’t identify every US state on a blank map.
Which gets into an entirely separate (though related) issue, where workers with children get benefits and accommodations that childless workers don’t.
Sometimes it’s overt and blatant like in your case, others, it’s more limited to interactions and relationships.
A few jobs ago, I worked in a small office where the owner was good about approving PTO, but didn’t want more than one person in any given dept out at the same time (ridiculous, but that’s how he was).
I planned a vacation of a long weekend one summer and got my PTO approved in like February for this long weekend in June.
Literally 3 weeks before, this lady I worked with tells me that I “need to reschedule my PTO”.
After looking into it, I learn that what’s really going on is that she wanted to take a week long vacation with her kids since they’d be off for the summer, and one of my days overlapped with the week she wanted to take.
I refused, saying that my friends and I had already made arrangements.
And then she blew it up, in the office in front of everyone, and told me how I was being so rude and mean and inconsiderate, that I could go and do things whenever I liked because I didn’t have kids…and that I “just didn’t get it” and could never possibly understand how hard her life was because I didn’t have kids.
I assumed that my boss and other coworkers would see how ridiculous she was, but while they mostly kept quiet, the ones who did speak up actually did think I was being unreasonable for not canceling my vacation to trade with her, seeing my plans as less than hers, just because she had kids.
I learned to get comfortable with coworkers thinking I was an asshole, though, and enjoyed every moment of that getaway.
Workers with children should get benefits childless workers don’t. They need them.
Rescheduling of PTO shouldn’t happen tho. That was on your boss to catch and mitigate.
The ideal baseline of all workers should be plenty adequate for everyone, regardless of marital status.
And yet workers with children need, at minimum, things like FMLA
I do not agree that everyone’s baseline is or should be the same.
Why should only workers with children get FMLA? Why can’t someone caring for their parents get the same?
That’s what GP meant.
I don’t know about giving extra benefits to workers with children. Certainly, workers with children should be given what they need to have a healthy work/life/family balance but I don’t think workers without kids should be denied those same opportunities just because they chose to live their personal life differently. I think workers in the same role should be equally compensated with all of the same benefits and opportunities which then can be utilized as best suits their personal situation.
I don’t see how a worker without kids is harmed here. This seems like a “I dont feel like we should kick puppies” argument - no one is insisting we kick these metaphorical puppies
They should all get the same amount of benefits, though possibly differing in kind.
Having children nowadays is a choice, not something beyond people’s control (like a disability), and people shouldn’t be getting extra rewards from work for making choices which have nothing to do with work.
It would be massivelly unfair to those who made a personal choice not to have kids to be de facto discriminated against because of that.
It’s not unfair. Your benefits include bing significantly wealthier and having more free time. Flexible time off for children isn’t some unreasonable ask.
While I agree that flexible time off for children isn’t a big ask, it’s disingenuous to say that childreee people are somehow not deserving of those same accommodations because they have more money and free time. First off, you don’t know someone’s personal or financial situation. They could be helping to support their aging parents or something. And second, it’s a choice to be a parent or not. If I go out and buy a Bugatti I don’t therefore deserve to have some special treatment from my job. And while kids are obviously more important to accommodate than a lot of other things (like cars, lol) they don’t somehow make the parents extra super special because they have a FaMiLy. Everyone has a family!
Reality is everyone needs those kinds of accommodations sometimes and employers should realize that employees are human with lives outside work.
I think it really depends on the place you’re working. My company honestly encourages us to take all of our leave in one chunk, because it’s easier to plan with. At least you should take one week at a time. I personally don’t like it though. I like looking forward to having a few days off every month. Having a whole month off and then working troughout the year is not for me.
I work in the automotive industry in the US, but we regularly interact with German suppliers (software and hardware). In my experience, in August especially it seems like half of their office is just out the entire month. I’m sure there’s tons of industries where that isn’t the case, though.
Here in England there’s a guy I work with who’s taking six months off soon to go to Thailand. Thing is, we’re working for the local authority and they’re pretty good about holidays and sick pay because the wages aren’t very competitive and they need to retain staff.
Lol as an American I feel uncomfortable putting in more than 2 consecutive DAYS in a row and I’m salaried, not a service worker or anything. I can’t even imagine having 2 weeks off. I’ve only been able to manage that once in my adult life during one of my transitions to a new company.
I feel for you! Here in Sweden we are allowed by law to take 4 consecutive weeks during the summer (June, July, August) but we don’t have to if we want to use it sometime else during the year, we usually start with 25 vacation days and need to use 20 of them before we get new days (happens in April for some reason I don’t know) and we can save all days above 20, so when/if you get more days you can save more as well. (So if you have 30 days, you can save 10 every year but there is a limit on how long you can save them IIRC).
