Man I’d kill to go on holiday. I straight up cant afford one though
As usual, it depends. Work conditions, cost of living and vacation days vary throughout european countries. The EU has set a minimum of 20 days and most do 20-25.
Afaik, EU mandates a minimum of 20 days, but yeah, there’s deviation between countries.
I mean even in europe you dont usuqlly go on 2 week vacations. Its like once a year if youre middle class but most people would choose to go on more shorter ones.
I mean even in europe you dont usuqlly go on 2 week vacations
Nonsense. In Germany, we usually have 6 weeks of paid vacation time. I usually spend two weeks in the summer south my family somewhere nice, another two weeks for Christmas and new year and then use the remaining days in conjunction with bank holidays, so you get a full week off while only “spending” three or four vacation days. If people at my job want “shorter” holidays, they usually just work some overtime in advance to then spend it on two or three days off.
These 36 hours occurred during the weekend.
The American dream is working every day of your life. Literally every day. No sick days. No vacations. Nothing. From the time you are 15 until you are 75. You can even brag about it like it’s some badge of honor. It’s amazing.
Carlin said it better: it’s called the american dream 'cos you’d have to be asleep to believe it.
And have a huge credit score.
It used to pay well. People used to buy big houses and earn pensions, and get a new car every 5 years or less.
Man oh fucking man, have times changed. No new cars, no houses at all… We’re lucky to get a decent rental that doesn’t go up more than $100 a year.
Goods are skyrocketing in price, LLM’s are taking jobs away, Healthcare costs are skyrocketing, wages are way, way, WAY below what they should be… I could keep going, but this is enough depressing things in one paragraph.
You don’t need a house anyway, they don’t want you to work from home any more.
Boomers love playing the work martyr. They’ve wrapped their entire sense of identity in working, their role at work, and some strange dogged determination that such a way of life has greater value than time spent with their family, children, friends, or pursuing any non-work interests.
And now huge swathes of them have nothing but their grinding mentality, as their family has splintered, their children have gone no-contact, and they have nothing of their Self to fall back on. It’s why they still perch on the upper rungs of our political and corporate ladders, punching down at anything they don’t understand.
My grandpa didn’t understand fiction. He grew up in a company town and was working in the mines after he completed sixth grade (12 years old). It was and is truly sad. He’d say things like why would you bother with that nonsense when someone mentioned watching a movie or reading a book.
After he was forced to retire due to dementia, he drove to the places he worked to talk to the workers about work. He did this every weekday. Dementia progressed, as it does. After far too many fender benders and running out of gas a few times in the middle of nowhere, his wife and daughter had to take the keys. After that he watched TV. He watched mostly the news, fox news and NBC nightly news. Occasionally the history channel. It was “real” so it was all that mattered.
We hardly had anything to talk about. We were politically and religiously opposite. I will say he was a union man and lifelong Democrat, so at least he wouldn’t have been down with any of the shit going on these days. I had dropped out of college and didn’t get a good paying job until after he died, so I was just a failure.
But. We finally connected when I got him to watch the show Survivorman with Les Stroud. He loved that shit. It was real.
Yup, boomers took the easy way out and drowned themselves in work rather than organize to change the system.
I know this is a hot take but boomers who don’t even know how to live without working after they have been on this planet for decades are pathetic, second in blame only to the cruel system that diminished them to shadows of their past selves.
Speaking to boomers here - shut up, turn your TV set to fox news off and take up birding or something else actually real, your work identity is a flimsy illusion of self, you need to actively explore who you are not contract it out to your job you old hateful, childish vampires of humanities’ future.
…and yes before the inveitable “not all Boomers!”, I know.
The American dream is that someday you’ll have other people work their lives away so you can have a comfy life of luxury.
It was always bullshit.
You might be the only person in here that gets this. There’s a very deep selfishness to the “American dream”. Like crabs in a bucket, you gotta grind to get on top of as many people as possible so that there’s less shit raining down from above. If you’re lucky you’ll have enough society below you that the work you do looks luxurious by comparison.
Reading this thread you can spot the Americans. Some upset they can’t work MORE. Victims, all.
And all that caused by Russia. It truly is malign. America’s problems are totally not caused internally.
So 4 ½ days, right? Right?
I had my architect leave for 3 months after he started the transition from AWS to google with full rewrite on the app and re-design of the system.
he did not care at all.
this is Sweden
National hero 💪
In sweden that’s just how it is.
Or everyone is a hero there 😁
2 weeks? That’s like a once a decade vacation.
28 days per year is standard at my company. With 5 working days, that’s over 5 weeks. And you are probably taking it when there are already public holidays / long weekends so you only need to use 4 days to get an entire week off.
So it’s normal to take 2 weeks long holidays twice a year.
Are you thinking of “vacation” as time off from work, or as an expensive trip to an exciting location?
Is it actually? I was required to take 3 weeks of during summer and 2 weeks off during the holidays last year
Once a few months 🙃
I used to work in the financial industry where it was mandated for compliance reasons that we take 2 (TWO) solid weeks of vacation. Reason being that if you were doing anything funny like cooking the systems, either people would catch it when they took over your duties or your absence would cause a discrepancy when you were unable to keep up your shenanigans.
I only had 2 (TWO) weeks of vacation. So in an act of mercy the company decided to bend compliance so that I only needed to take one solid week off and the other week was mine to take at another time or split up as needed. You know, rather than give me any more vacation time.
As a european, I simply do not understand how America even acts as if it functions. Shit cost of living, Shit work hours/week, shit vacation time, “benefits” that we see as the bare fucking minimum for us to even show up to an interview, shit healthcare system, shit unemployment system.
Y’all are slaves, but most of you don’t even realise it.
Especially how can you be productive? I mean you’d dig more holes if you work more hours, but mental work just breaks down when people are overworked.
Manual labor also has its limitations. I used to work in construction, and after my 37 hours my body didn’t want to continue. Sure, I’ve worked more some weeks in an attempt to get roofing done before a period of bad weather, but I’m not convinced I actually did more work than regularly, because I’d just be more tired the following day/week.
Of course, but up until a certain “classic” limit, it’s quite linear, right? Like work 2 days get 2 days of work done. Work 3 get 3. Or maybe you’d be as productive in 4 days as a tired person doung 5?
Literally everything is a farce, almost every product, every deal and agreement is an inherent ripoff, and there’s a catch to everything short of taking a walk in a park.
shit, they towed my car
That’s the rub though isn’t it? Most are fed propaganda and believe it and fuck the rest who actually know this.
I work for a shitty big ass company. I get the legal minimum of time off. In new York that’s seven days a year. One of my coworkers is in Texas, so she gets zero.
The us is an embarrassment
Edit: and technically that’s sick leave, not vacation time. I don’t think you need to prove you were sick, and mental health without a diagnosis seems like it’s covered, but if you said you wanted to go on a trip they might say that’s not allowed.
Highlights for the curious: https://ag.ny.gov/resources/individuals/workers-rights/benefits-and-leave
It’s legal to have ZERO days off a year?! This feels like a human rights violation somehow
This whole country is a human rights violation.
That’s my Americans never leave the US. They don’t have time. ,
In theory, vacation time is supposed to be something you negotiate as part of your employment contract. Conservatives believe that market forces will balance out the needs of the worker and the company, as companies with bad employment practices will have trouble finding employees.
In practice, that only works for high-demand positions with a small labor pool. Basically everyone else has no negotiating power because employers have a huge pool to pick from. Conservatives say employees can just go somewhere else to get a better job or go back to school (another topic), but that also doesn’t work in when all the available jobs do the same thing.
Basically, it’s an extension of rugged individualism. It’s up to the individual to take care of themselves. The fact that the landscape in which most people must operate doesn’t allow for it is ignored.
Oh the old conservative “I don’t care about your rights”.
We have a soft version over here that boils down to “everyone can get a job, it’s not that hard, just go out and get one” but with 50 unemployed per 8 jobs openings (that doesn’t always match but that’s another story) that just shows they don’t care and don’t want to help.
According to this CBS article https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-in-four-workers-in-us-dont-get-any-paid-vacation-time-or-holidays/
1 in 4 workers don’t get any paid vacation time. It’s from 2019 but it’s not like things have gotten better over there since then.
I doubt they have a 7 day work week. That would be unusual. But they probably do have zero PTO. Sick? Come to work or don’t get paid. No vacations.
I personally have been at the same company for almost 20 years and have a bunch of banked sick time because I never got sick much. But last year I had to use 8 days because I have a toddler in daycare and I got sick a lot, for the first time in almost 20 years. I got written up. For using my banked sick time for sicknesses.
Double check and see if your state protects the use of your sick time.
In the state I live, there are special protections for using sick time. If they so much as make a comment about it that’s a violation. A write up would probably get the business sued by the state.
Oh thanks for the idea. I checked and no, it’s Florida and apparently they just wrote a law to prevent even cities from making such a law, ensuring that this lack of protection is uniform across the state.
I will just add this to the pile of reasons I am leaving the state as soon as I can.
I have 6 weeks per year of vacation, with pay 🇩🇰
Is this the minimum required, or just common?
We have 4 weeks annual leave (not including sick leave and public holidays) and I reckon it’s not enough 🇦🇺
Probably because our union movement has been crushed by years of hostile governments and right wing media monopoly.
It’s around 5 weeks in the EU, sometimes 4 IIRC. France, where I live it’s 5, and if you work more than 35h a week you pile that up for sporadic “vacation” days, last job I had was 37.5h/w and 5w + 11 of those days (the difference is that you might not be allowed to use them as a big ass holiday, but most people use them a bit like that, a bit for the dentist etc).
And the normal holidays of course like 8 of May, IIRC there are like 11.
Pay or feriepenger?
I just get paid my normal salary plus 12.5%
Yes, i get more when i take my vacation
If i worked 9 months in a company and quit, i would get it as “feriepenge” where i can request the money online when i note which days i am taking off.
Not the same user, but it’s pay for me, not feriepenge
People in Norway say they have paid vacation, but it’s really a forced savings scheme coming out of your paycheck every month. That’s why I’m suspicious. Anyway, that’s great for you. Denmark is probably the superior Scandinavian nation
What’s the difference, in the end? Are wages after accounting for this worse for Norwegians than Danes? At the end of the day any mandatory paid holiday system means the employee does less work so is less valuable to the employer (benefits of returning refreshed notwithstanding - in any case all these effects should be the same regardless of what financial rules govern it) so the employer might want to pay them less in total.
But this should reach an equilibrium where the cost to the employer is similar for similar amounts of labour, resulting in similar pay.
That’s wild. I get 35 days plus bank holidays plus 42 hours a year for when you need to take a few hours off at the end of the day or start a few hours late if you have other commitments.
Germany: 24 would be the legal lower limit, but it’s almost always 30 days (+ bank holidays). If you’re disabled add 5 more.
Side note: 24 days if you work 6 days a week, 20 days if you work 5 days a week.
But yes, commonly 30 days if you work 5 days a week.
Danke
I get 10 bank holiday a year.
You spend an awful lot of time in the bank.
And how many (paid) public holidays do you have? Or are they part of those 7?
Zero. I can use some of the 7 for holidays.
Well, sort of. The state gives you 56 hours of sick leave, which isn’t technically the same as vacation. Mental health, even without diagnosis, is a permitted use. My job didn’t give me any grief when I used some of my time to cover the holidays, but I didn’t have enough so some days I just didn’t get paid. (You acrue time off by working, and I started late in the year)
Oh, and this company also really dragged their feet on answering my questions about it, and told me one rule that’s just illegal here. I ended up looking it up myself, and thankfully they didn’t push back.
https://www.ny.gov/programs/new-york-paid-sick-leave if you’re morbidly curious.
Edit: they also had the nerve to send out “happy holidays!” Emails wishing me happy and healthy times. No pay, just thoughts and prayers.
Public holidays are not mandatory time off let alone paid in the US. Many employers that give paid time off do include at least some holidays, but which ones and how many is variable between employers. Some will give every federal holiday and others will be only the really big ones like Christmas, thanksgiving, independence day, etc.
One of the most exciting things about the job I currently have is that I get around 15 holiday days a year off, in addition to my normal vacation time. It’s a rarity. My last two jobs only had 7 holiday days - that stretch from New years day to Memorial day (end of May) was always brutal.
3 DAY WEEKEND WOOOO WE’RE DRINKIN 14 BEERS AT CHILIS TONIGHT 🎆 🎆 🎆
I had to schedule my vacation days because by law I couldn’t push further. We are in the middle of a super complicated project that I’m leading. Oh well
By law?
In my country yes
There is zero reason to give out such little holiday time in the US. Its literally just mean
It took me way too long to get the joke.
Yeah I’m American.I mean I cannot remember the last time I took 36 hours off…
If I work over night (like literally to the morning), I will some time take the next day off, and then have a slow day after :( Most of the time, I only take the morning off.
Hopefully, life will get better, but I don’t honestly see an obvious way off…
