Well yeah, but what this image doesn’t mention is what would happen to the shareholders if we had paid leave for all in the US 😰 /j
No, what it doesn’t show is what the French people did to get all that paid leave.
Exactly!
The elite need to be reminded of the old ways. France is still champ in international internal politics. Their protests often end up being a real headbanger…
And what we must still do, regularly, to fight against people taking social rights from us. This is a hard thing to do, and we have lost a few battles lately.
Whatever it is, we should do it in America :)
Something Great and French. Later Russia followed them with something Great and October. Got universal healthcare, universal education, universal housing and labour law as result.
Take 60% the salary
My dude is trying to make it about taxes. When in reality the French aren’t afraid to trash the streets and burn corporate HQs to get what they want. Taxes are our way of helping your fellow man. Do you not like to help your fellows?
No I’m not talking about taxes, I’m talking about the fact that french salaries are 60% American ones.
What is their average buying power within their relative market?
That does suck on paper.
How could the poor, poor CEOs afford their super yachts?
And their 24 new cars!
Sweden:
- 25-35 days vacation, most commonly.
- Maternity + paternity leave: 480 days combined, per child, + 10 days unannounced allowed for the parent not giving birth, immediately following the birth.
- Sick leave: almost ♾️ as far as I know, too…?
🇸🇪🥇❓
Edit: I’m curious about the other Scandinavian countries regarding this topic (including Finland). If anyone from those countries wants to contribute here, please feel free!
pretty much the same in Denmark. I still don’t know how to spend all of the vacation days. We just used up Mandatory 3 summer weeks, and I’m kinda tired of resting this year, but I still have 3 weeks left
I had a similar situation last year after being on paternity leave 5 months and then still having 30 days of PTO.
Solution: 4 day work week. Either Wednesdays or Fridays off. I took Wednesdays. You have two “Fridays” per week and Friday is never more than one working day away. You get one day a week completely for you, kids in school, partner at work, every shop and office open. You can do any delayed paperwork, any repairs around the house, take a jew hobby, or just watch TV for 6 hours straight (wouldnt recommend every week but it took me back to my days of being sick from school).
If you are single and like traveling probably Fridays would be better.
take a jew hobby
Oh boy.
Wow, as far as typos go, that one was one of the more unfortunate ones… (I meant new!)
Why isn’t there an emoji for rage-filled weeping of blood and gnashing of teeth?
Emojis are the only way I can express emotion.
I’m sorry, I felt like bragging, but I really don’t know what to do with all that time, and one of the reasons is that I tend to spend money on vacations, and I don’t like to spend money, I like to save.
But really, it’s not Denmark or Sweden that good, it’s US laws are bad. Ok, in Denmark I have 5 weeks by law and one more from my company (which is a usual perk). But I moved there from Russia, where the working culture sucks (overtime, envelope salary, etc), and overal situation with any human rights is not that funny, but people still have 28 calendar day paid vacation.but people [in Russia] still have 28 calendar day paid vacation.
Wow, that’s something I didn’t know before, or expected. TIL. 👍
There are possibilities of shitty company’s behaviour though: in case of said “envelope” salary, you still get some part of it officially (like minimum wage), so if the place is shitty enough, they can pay you only the official part, so you have a “not-so-paid” vacation. Or they come up with some reasons to not sign your vacation: “why July? Look at the schedule and better take February! We’re family and family needs you now!”
It’s not everywhere like that - usually low-skill and/or blue-collar stuff. But I encountered that in IT when I was starting out (and didn’t have much choise with tetail jobs in my cv)
We usually use a day or two here and there to get long weekends where there are one-off holidays. It helps spend the days, and gives you some needed rest during the working period of the year. 👍
Isn’t it nowadays also grandparents can get some of the parental leave if they help with the child? Sick leave is not infinity, but you would need to get a long period of illness before anything happens I guess.
Yep, I believe so. And you can also even transfer parental leave to a friend, if they help with the child. We did this for a friend of ours who is a single mom and needed help with her child.
25-35 days vacation,
Ok, Sweeden is better than Russia(at least 28 days). After Pu goes to Hauge(or Russian prison) things may change.
Wait, we were comparing to USA? Yeah, we know it’s a corpse.
How does infinite sick leave work?
In Australia an employer pays 12 or so days a year for personal leave, (+ 12 public holidays + 20 days annual leave).
Any additional sick leave is unpaid.
An employer couldn’t really be expected to pay sick leave indefinitely. Is it paid by some kind of insurance or social security?
You can claim a govt pension for illness. It’s difficult to qualify long term though.
In Germany your employer has to pay for all sick leave up to continuous 6 weeks. After that insurance pays you 60% of your last paycheck. There are a lot of exceptions, for example if it’s a work related accident your employer has to pay 100% of your last paycheck indefinitely until you go into early/disability retirement.
Oh shit. Somebody quick come pour that vat of frying oil over me so I can live my best life.
Let’s say I get sick
Day 1: 0% pay Day 2-14: 80% pay from my employer
Day 15-90: “barely” 80% from Försäkringskassan, up to a relatively low ceiling (disfavours those with high incomes, doesn’t really affect the common worker). With a collective agreement from a union you could also get an additional 10-15%(?) from your employer
Day 90-: pretty much the same, the 10% from the employer is replaced by insurance instead. If you’re sick this long it’ll be a bit of a bureaucratic PITA
Edited to fix formatting
In Belgium There’s a social security system that pays your wage when you’re sick up a certain maximum. The first month(4 weeks) you get sick is fully paid by the employer. After that you get paid by social security for 60% of your wage up until a certain maximum.
If you are absent from work for 8 months ( cancer, surgery, burn out, … ) you would be paid for every day you are absent, albeit less after a month.
While sick you are also protected from being fired. So employers can’t fire you because you’re out fighting cancer. It is mostly adhered to. If an employer would fire somebody who got cancer or because they got a burn-out/depression I’d probably find a different employer.
It’s a good system, but with its own challenges ( abuse ). I honestly can’t imagine having a fixed amount of paid sick days.
your employer can always “challenge” your sickness by sending a company physician, which they’d have to pay for. Some companies do it per definition, others never, some only when they suspect abuse.
How does infinite sick leave work?
At one of my previous jobs (in the US) we had unlimited Paid Time Off. In practice, you’re still under the same pressure to get shit done or get canned so you don’t really take any more time off than you would have otherwise. And when you’re eventually canned anyway in order to boost the stock price, you don’t have any accrued time off that has to be paid out in a lump sum.
Yeah US style unlimited PTO is a joke, it was so transparent what it was really trying to achieve when my American colleagues got it at my old job.
480 days are not paid are they? Because in Finland and Germany you get about one year paid that you can distribute between the parents. And up to two more years unpaid.
480 days, paid. You can’t distribute between the parents here however you like though. Only 45 days are transferable between partners, to encourage equal time spent with the child.
Also some amount of days out of the 480 are of one level of compensation, and the rest are of another level. I don’t recall the specifics of that off the top of my head, though.
Found out this year my country offers father’s (up to a combined) 52 weeks paternity leave with pay (~60% full time earnings)
Couldn’t imagine just dropping this little guy on my wife and heading to work the next day
I’ve always found it dumb that fathers get less paid leave. but i guess it’s better than… checks notes… zero.
You could make the argument that they don’t have massive body trauma to heal from…
But I think the time is more important to form that first bond more than anything
Bonding time is important but it’s also important to get into the habit of looking after the children as a father. Otherwise odds on you won’t manage to bond very well with either your child or the mother 😅
That’s the problem, what we have is reasonable for physical recovery after giving birth. However we need a political party to champion “family values” or something to help parents take care of the kid after they are born
True story - the time I almost got direct immediate benefit from a feminist organization …… when my kids were born, there was no leave so the best I could do was one week vacation. However a good friend of mine thought it was unfair so got together with her feminist group and petitioned the company for paternity leave!
They didn’t go for it, at least in time to help me, but they did do it before FMLA made them do something
*mandated paid leave
There are a ton of people in the US who have really good paid leave policies at their jobs, it’s just that there are also a ton of people who have really bad leave policies at their jobs
Yes, that’s the point.
There are a ton of people in the US who have none of that paid leave.
In France (and many other countries), paid leave is a right that’s protected by law. So everyone gets it.
Your comment is kind of like saying “It doesn’t matter what minimum wage is because lots of people make more than minimum wage!”
I didn’t say at all that it doesn’t matter
I don’t think anybody who sees this would think that literally nobody in the USA has a job that offers any paid time off.
You did bring up a valid point and people should know fwcts but in modern context, ain’t nobody got time for nuance.
“It doesn’t matter what minimum wage is because lots of people make more than minimum wage!”
Which is kinda true when essentially no-one except for teenagers makes minimum wage.
essentially no-one except for teenagers makes minimum wage.
Do you have a source for that?
1.1% of workers earned the minimum wage or less
44% being under 25, despite only 20% of total workers being under 25.
This data doesn’t not include tips or commissions.
70% of those earning at or below minimum wage worked in hospitality, 65% food preparation and serving related. 49% were part time workers.
0.8% of all workers earned minimum wage or below, but 3.1% of 16-19 year olds did.
Unfortunately it doesn’t break down with tips/commissions. But you can sort of innacurrately guess at it by seeing that 57% of the below minimum wage is 25+. This means they are earning tips (assuming their not paid illegally). So, majority of those earning minimum wage without tips are probably 16-24.
Thank you for the source. 1.1% is a small percentage, but a lot of people, especially when talking about a country the size of the US.
Another element that’s difficult to capture, but relevant, is how many people are making wages that would be influenced by a raised minimum wage? Raising it one dollar would probably capture a lot of people. Raising it $5 even more. The $15/h some places were championing for would likely capture quite a lot of people, especially of it were enacted nation-wide, but I understand that that’s a very far reach.
I worked at a place that paid minimum wage + X, where X was based on experience and such. This included new hires. At some point, they stopped bumping previous employees up when minimum wage went up, and of course they wondered why a lot of long-term staff were quitting lol
Thats definitely true to an extent
Cope Haha
JFC
Also what % of working population = “a ton”
Asking for a friend
According to the BLS, about 45% of nonunion workers in the private sector have paid vacation time and about 75% have paid sick leave. The numbers are quite a bit higher in unionized and public sector jobs. A bunch of states have implemented various mandatory paid leave laws. At the nonunion hospital I used to work at here in Texas, everyone got about 6 weeks of paid time off, which could be used as sick time or vacation time, plus 9 paid holidays. This included housekeeping, food services, nurses, everyone.
I’m not coping, I clearly stated above the current situation is really bad for a lot of people, but it’s also not “zero paid leave for everyone in the US” as implied by the graphic
You are still coping but thanks for the numbers.
Ok
Yeah i have yet to meet a US citizen that wasnt surprised by the difference in work culture in the EU.
I’m a US citizen, worked in the EU. Was surprised people were willing to stay until 8pm, never saw that in the US. But this was in very white collar jobs.
I like that my colleagues are happy that I am going on holiday rather than feeling betrayed.
Also, insane how sick leave in the US needs a doctor’s note immediately and is limited.
Jesus. I wouldn’t know what to do with 30 days vacation per year. That would be life changing.
I used to work in France. The 30 days is just the beginning. I ended up with 44 paid holidays per year towards the end of my contract. There are different types of paid leave and I got 9 days extra because one of my children has a disability.
However, the work culture in France is extremely toxic. You face a sort of social othering if you don’t conform with the unspoken rules which are even harder to understand if French is not your first language. Punishments include being managed/bored out and being “put in the cupboard” where you’re given a dead end role and basically left to rot until retirement. There’s a history of work related suicide in France.
Even so, you are a lot more free than in other countries. I’m not complaining. Plus, unions still have actual powers there (although they’re being eroded down)
yeah, I’ll be really sad about that taking two months of vacation a year
I guess when the environment is toxic af, you need more vacation
That’s just bare minimum mandated by law. Some companies offer even more than that.
Don’t want to spend all your money on vacations? Just take Fridays off during your favourite season to spend outdoors!
Where I’m from a 36 hour work week is the norm. I work 4 × 9 hours and have every Wednesday off (plus I have like 9 weeks off every year). Some colleagues do work 40 hours a week and then save a day off every two weeks. A friend does this and he takes one fairly long holiday (like a month) and also a week or two off every two months or something.
And you can also take a sabbatical and be guaranteed of your job when you get back. A guy I know from another department took a year off to take a trip around the world with his girlfriend.
I take all Fridays off (4x8), but I only have 27 days PTO because of that rather than 33.
Between my current job (unlimited PTO) and my last (30 days PTO) I’ve had 30+ for the last 10 years.
Last year I used 35+ days.
A lot of it goes to smaller things. 1 or 2 days here and there. Few days camping, turn a 3 day weekend in to a 4 day, etc… It really can change how you use your time.
Australia too. At least until we imported all that “contractor” bullshit from overseas. After 1 year service you get four weeks leave - every year.
I’m in France and have ~120 paid vacation days per year. My full time is 18h/week. The pay is okayish. But for all those advantages, it’s great.
Teacher?
Live life
I get 30 some days of vacation and I forget what for sick. Believe me, you’d figure out how to use it.
Believe me, you’d figure out how to use you.
For sure. I tend to take every friday off with my vacation time, but that’s really only for a few months. If I could do that for half the year, it really would change my life.
I have a couple of longer vacations I do every year. I take 10 days off for nationals and post nationals recovery for a sport I’m involved with. And I like to finish the year with two weeks off at the end of the year. It’s the best way to maximize number of consecutive days off to the number of vacation days required.
Reminds me of a comedians joke,
American: and how many sick days go you get off?
European: All of them? If you’re sick, you don’t go to work…
That’s not a joke, that’s just a fact. A sad fact for some of us on the left side of the pond.
Crazy how Europe outperformed the US during COVID.
So… I’m not shilling for the military, but…
Coast guard gets 30 days of leave, 3 months of paternity leave, and unlimited sick days.
Just saying.
Edit: to be clear, US Coast Guard.
It’d be cool except the non zero chance of catching a bullet just because I wanted to have benefits other people have for free… and I know that I could be shot in civilian life too. But like, doesn’t that just make it worse
I suppose. I’m far more likely to die in a helicopter crash. Never been shot at, nor have just about anybody I’ve worked with. The only people who have gone to a war zone in the past couple decades were people who specifically requested it.
Though I have worked with a few who survived helicopter crashes (five, between two crashes), so definitely not without its dangers. That’s the specific job I chose, though. Plenty of jobs in the Coast Guard with paper cuts or oven-related burns as the most danger they’ll experience.
Good high school friend of mine was career Coast guard. He was a flight commander for one of those big helicopters and retired with some high falutin’ upper level officer rank.
He told me that there were a lot of details he couldn’t tell me but that he’d lost several of his colleagues in crashes.
He also implied that there were some bullets flying out of fast boats coming from the south.
Poor guy took up regional jet piloting right after he retired and almost immediately got the Parkinson’s. To conclude and show his character, he self reported himself out of a job long before the symptoms were externally visible.
That’s true! There can definitely be really good opportunities there. I just like to be contrarian
It’d be cool except the non zero chance of catching a bullet
In the coast guard? I think you’d have a higher risk just walking in many cities.
Well more just the military in general. It’s mostly just free college roulette. My uncle got free college but also he was almost blown up in a rocket attack. His friends from the same rocket attack didn’t make it to college…
I mostly hear military people from where I am say “there is free education! You pansies just have to earn it” idk just seems problematic to me haha
Well there’s a lot of roles you can join for with basically no risk of being shot…
Edit: to be clear, US Coast Guard.
Was about to say, the Lesotho coast guard doesn’t have anything that good.
Lesotho doesn’t have a coast.
Then again, Switzerland is also landlocked, but they do have a navy.
Lesotho doesn’t have a coast.
Uh, that might have been the joke.
I know. I just wanted to bring up one of my favorite weird facts, the existence of the Swiss navy.
But it’s not really true. Switzerland has no naval branch of its armed forces.
It has a dozen or so of 10t patrol boats armed with a single 50cal MG for its lakes, and those are organized in a single motor boat company, which is staffed and manned by the military engineers branch.
Their duties are supporting the border guard (police) on the lakes against trespass/ smugglers and assisting (civilian) search& rescue.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s a navy.
When one’s employer has lower regard for their employee’s welfare than the US military, something is well and truly borked.
t. many military friends and family with infinite horror stories about health damage outside of combat zones and lots of “Not Service Related” responses
So… A big blue retail company is on par… When I worked there I got 16 weeks of paternity leave paid (well, between a mixture of paid leave and PTO), 31 days of PTO, and… Any sick days came out of the PTO.
Was a salaried manager.
Can’t believe I’m saying it, but nobody has ever been able to come close to their benefits that I know of, at least in the US.
Costco?
USAF too
The obligatory (paid ofc) vacation is 5 weeks not 6.
Lots of people have more, like 6 weeks + 12-24 RTT (days you can take here and there, it’s really great) and sometimes you can trade them for money etc., with the exception of the 5 weeks.
In Massachusetts where I’m lucky enough to live, everyone is given at least 12 weeks paid bonding time for birth of a child that can be taken as needed for up to one year after birth of their child. The birthing parents also gets 6-8 weeks of additional paid time. I think some other New England states also have a similar benefits. It’s an awesome program that should be modeled around the rest of the nation. Really IMO it should be a full 52 weeks, but I’ll take it as a solid starting point
im in Virginia and one time i had a really bad norovirus infection and my employer told me i would terminated if i didn’t show up and that he couldnt do anything about it (this was my 6th sick day in the past 11 months)
i showed up and had an accident on myself, very messy. Norovirus messy.
I walked into his office, reeking like hell, and i asked him if he had any mints or febreeze
He tried to send me home to change and i declined.
I think we’re all hoping you successfully infected your boss.
no clue, i had spent the last 48 hours losing all the moisture in my body so i was pretty dehydrated and had a fever
that entire week was like a weird dream
i really should not have driven a car in the physical state i was in, tbh
Isn’t that due to Mitt Romney of all people? Part of “Romneycare?” I don’t want to give him credit, but that’s what I seem to remember.
Actually “Romneycare” is what we call masshealth and it’s the ACA before the ACA was national. Essentially mandated but state subsidized health insurance on a sliding scale. The Paid Family Medical Leave with inclusion if bonding time is a different program and only came into effect in the past year or two with an additional payroll tax paid by every employee and employer in MA (it’s a pretty tiny surcharge though, and to be transparent you only get 60% of your wages up to a certain amount, I think 1100/wk, while your taking the time). Here’s to hoping the federal govt will someday follow.
Thanks for the explanation.
And some people say it’s a toxic work culture in Japan. I mean, it’s far from perfect, but still not like the example here.
The toxic culture in Japan stems from the unspoken expectations.
You have a 40 hour schedule, but you’re expected to be in the office for +60. You get vacation time, but it’s shameful to use it. Women (particularly young women) aren’t given promotions or professional advancement because it’s assumed they’ll quit to become housewives as soon as they find a husband of a higher station.
All that shit you hear about microaggression, implicit bias, and structural racism run rampant in the Japanese corporate world.
When Japan capped overtime to 45 hours per month
It became shameful to log your overtime
Also to get time and a half you need to work over 60 hours but you don’t get that if you aren’t logging
Yikes, that’s lawsuit territory in the US. Like, my uncle was a lawyer on a lawsuit with similar facts.
Historically Japanese lawsuits around overtime had been companies suing employees for claiming wages
At the place that I interned in software development, there was a period of time before I was there where the hours were starting to creep to long enough that the workers (salaried) were effectively being paid less than minimum wage. Legend has it that there was a mention of a lawsuit if the company didn’t shape up. One coworker who had been there at that point described it as a dark point in the company’s history. In response, they temporarily switched to hourly and 40 hours a week.
Later, some people apparently started working over 40 hours a week of their own volition. Workaholics, I guess. At the behest of one of the people on my team, the CIO talked to them about sticking to normal hours. Part of it was that people just aren’t great developers after already working a long day. The other part was that no one else wanted to slide back into those long working hours. A few people also had had kids in the intervening years, so I don’t think they wanted to see their hours eaten by work.
There’s some hope though. Younger people are starting to call bullshit on all this. Perhaps the fact that there’s an abudance of overworked old people everywhere is helping drive different thinking for everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQs4NERVZxc
Where I live in Canada, we used to have 0 paid sick days, then we got 3 days shortly before an election, and they lost and the replacement party removed those 3 paid sick days.
They also chopped down the unpaid sick days from 10 to 3, probably hoping nobody would notice.
Nobody noticed. They got re-elected with a majority vote (done by about 1/3 of the voting population)
Yeah. Ontario voters and smooth brains. Name a better combination.
my job has “paid sick time” but you cant use it if youre out of PTO and if you have PTO it takes off your PTO. how dumb is that. my coworker lost all his PTO by getting super sick for 2 weeks at the start of the year
Speedway and parent conpany 7 Eleven just did this this year everywhere it isn’t illegal. Made it so you only have PTO time and sick time takes it out of your pto. Thankfully that’s illegal in Michigan for hourly employees.
Which also has the fun situation of if you get promoted to general manager you loose your sick time because of going to salary vs hourly.
What a strange policy. So that just reduces sick leave to, what, an “unscheduled vacation”?
What’s weirder is that this eliminates some incentive to schedule a vacation in advance, provided you can lie about being sick.
Is it also at double rate, or you don’t even have 28 days of vacation?
Sounds to me like you don’t get any sick time.
We got a whole generation full of lead paint chips to thank for this
A lot of private professional trades in the US get all of these. They’re “economically viable” for a certain class of (supposedly very productive and important) staff but completely untenable for another larger, lower class of (supposedly lazy and easily replaceable) staff.
Even within the same firm.
If you work in McDs Corporate or occupy a management position at The Dollar Tree, somehow there’s money for leave that doesn’t exist for everyone else.
You might also notice a certain gender, religion, and race component to this, but I would try very hard not to think hard about it either.
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