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Study Finds That Asians Take Fewest Vacation Days, Europeans Take Most
- patio11 11y agoJapanese workers are offered an average of twenty days off each year and take only twelve, leaving eight unused vacation days lying on the table. No lie, that's a qualified success: it used to be 14 days offered and 8 exercised in Japan, as recently as a few years ago. (The 2006ish timeframe? Read it in a work-related report. [+]) [+] Proving once again that you can almost never underestimate how bad the Japanese work culture is, the actual stats from 平成19年就労条件総合調査結果の概況 (covering 2006) were, at companies above 1,000 employees, 9.7 days offered and 5 actually used. You might think "Well maybe that's the megacorps being shoddy" but the actual numbers get worse as you go down the size-of-employer table.
- artifaxx 11y agoThat's just scary. It definitely shows how much culture can change/warp our ideas about existence. Although that few days off probably is a significant factor in heightened Japanese suicide rates.
- brianwawok 11y agoI am not sure the days off to hours per week ratio for a sane life.. I.e. I hear 12 days off and I shrug. I hear 18 hour workdays and never seeing your family and my jaw drops. I think if I worked 20h weeks, 0 days off would be okay. You never get THAT burned out over a week that the weekend can't cure you. But if I worked 80 hour weeks, I would need 30 days off per year to stay long term sane.
- artifaxx 11y agoOf course, that makes perfect sense. It is the number of days off being so low combined with things like this: http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/ that make me truly concerned. The combination of hours and lack of days off surely takes a toll on mental health and productivity.
- droidist2 11y agoI'd rather have shorter weeks and zero days off, but that just might be my personality. I hate the idea that once in a while I'll get a vacation that I'll enjoy half of and spend the last half dreading going back.
- ljf 11y agoSounds like you need a new job? I can honestly say that I'm usually excited and energised after a holiday and ready to get back to work. Sure there is part of me that would like to stay on a beach or with my family for ever, but equally there is a large part of me that enjoys solving the problems I solve at work and the people I work with. I definitely felt that dread in the past though, but don't think that is how it has to be. There are great roles out there!
- bane 11y agoMind blowing (but not surprising) is how low Japan (and South Korea) ranks in terms of worker productivity. IIR, if South Koreans worked at a similar productivity as Norwegians, they could take half the week off with no effects at all on GDP. Japan is only slightly better. In other words, quite a bit of those long work hours are absolutely useless.
- pedrosorio 11y agoNorway is perhaps not the best country for comparison. If South Koreans could get 22% of their GDP and 67% of their exports from the Oil & Gas sector that would help their productivity too. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/norway/ http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...
- rahimnathwani 11y agoThis is overly-simplistic, and misses three key points: 1) Labour productivity is measured as the _average_ output per worker, i.e. total output divided by total number of workers. It does not measure the _marginal_ output of an additional worker (i.e. the derivative of output with respect to number of workers). 2) Labour is not the only factor of production. There is also land, financial capital, technology, etc. 3) Haircuts in Norway cost more than haircuts in South Korea. Is a South Korean barber less productive than a Norwegian one?
- nightcracker 11y agoSo if I understand correctly we should compare: 1. Median household income (which should mostly be wages and not land, financial capital, technology). 2. Divided by purchasing power parity (to normalize for different prices in the country). 3. Divided by average hours worked per week for households with median income. This is however assuming that if an employee gets paid X (in purchasing power parity) for their work, then their generated value is some linear constant of X. I don't know how to compensate for the scenario where this is false.
- hueving 11y ago
- sdrothrock 11y agoI wonder. Japan also has 16 national holidays in comparison with (for example) the US's 11.
- WildUtah 11y agoThe importance of that really depends on who observes holidays. There is no legal incentive for US employers to observe any. I don't know where your eleven come from, but that sounds like the Federal Government's number for its employees. Private employers typically observe 4-8, including Christmas.
- omegaham 11y agoCan confirm, get seven holidays. On the bright side, I'm a shift worker, so I get to take holidays whenever I want, no questions asked. It's bundled in with my PTO, except it doesn't roll over if I don't use it. As a result, your first seven days of PTO are "holidays."
- Natsu 11y agoDo they have any way to figure in the part where salarymen often work Saturdays? If you add in the shorter weekends, I'm not sure if you even get to the equivalent of zero days off.
- ronnier 11y agoAt my company in Japan, we had 20 public holidays though. That's a lot more than we get in the US. But those public holidays come at a cost -- trying to do any sort of activity during Golden Week is next to impossible because of overcrowding.
- will_pseudonym 11y agoThat just sounds outright stressful. That sounds like Black Friday shopping in the USA, something I avoid like the plague every year.
- rtpg 11y agoIt's not nearly as bad as Black Friday (except the roads and Shinkansen in really popular routes). Hotels are full but hotels are full other times of the year too. The logistics end up working out
- rtpg 11y agoAnother peculiar aspect is that Japan is the country with the most bank holidays in the world, so if you're in the lucky half of the population that has the "salaryman" qualification (mon-fri) then you get almost a week in January , almost a week in May,and a dozen or so guaranteed 3 day weekends (including this one)
- johnshaft1000 11y agoShocker. They really needed a study to determine this?
- hooliu 11y agoYes, because the alternative is racism.
- menacingly 11y agowait, (correctly) anticipating the result of a study is racism?
- CardenB 11y agoYes because you don't have evidence to support your theory. You're generalizing with insufficient data.
- tbrownaw 11y agoI disagree. It's not insufficient data, it's uncharacterized data. If more-or-less everyone with exposure to both cultures is in broad agreement about the differences, that's not "insufficient". It's probably actually more data than any formal study would generate. But it's also lower-quality data, with a greater chance of being distorted by various cognitive biases. Which means that it doesn't meet current regulatory standards[1] for use on large protected-class[2] groups of humans. . [1] as loosely and collectively defined by the morality police, loudest / most extreme non-ignorable activists, Internet Lynch Mob, etc [2] which includes pretty much anything these days
- CardenB 11y agoHow do you know if it's "more-or-less everyone" without a formal study to prove it? You only know anecdotally, which, as you said, is subject to various cognitive biases.
- johnkpush 11y agoI worked for a Swedish company. Because of holidays, vacation leave, maternity and paternity leave, and sick days, there were employees of the company that I never saw. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it took quite a while to get used to it.
- robertnn 11y agoI'm Swedish, and there are definitely people that are away for long periods of time (usually paternity leave), but was it really that many people that you never met? :-) How long did you work there? Not trying to be snarky, I just want to point out that it's not like you can take vacation year round (even if you're in Sweden..), even though we certainly have quite a bit of vacation (25 days is the norm) and no problem taking half a year of per parent per child.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoI like the ambiguity in your comment that leaves open the possibility that it was you that never turned up for work due to these various ways if taking time off.
- jamesblonde 11y agoI live in Sweden too, and I don't get your point. Swedish productivity per worker is up at the top in global terms. Much of Swedish society is set up to benefit workers, and in particular families. So, yes maybe a colleague wasn't at work for 12 months due to paternity or maternity leave. But that's great. Companies need to be structured so that no one worker is indispensible. Once you get your head around that, everything else is logical.
- mavdi 11y agoNot only that, in Asia they work longer hours too. When I visited Japan, I noticed rush hour in Tokyo would start round about 6pm and would go on until 10pm. Compare that with London, starts around 5pm and pretty much everyone is dispersed by 7pm.
- csantini 11y agoNot working at all is the inevitable (awesome) future of humanity.
- jacquesm 11y agoI wouldn't bet on that.
- csantini 11y agoMe neather, short term. But in the long run Capitalism will not want humans, we're too expensive. It also really makes no sense to work, I think this will become increasingly more evident. Note: Marx wouldn't agree with me. He would say that the rich will still have the means of production (automation), so the poor will still do stupid jobs to get paid that little to afford the products made by automation. It's basically like it now, but I hope this will change. There is no startup that can fix this. We need to collectively own the automation to not work.
- alextgordon 11y agoYou're describing a depression, though. High unemployment -> less demand -> fewer jobs -> repeat.
- 31reasons 11y agoInternet provides you access to unlimited amount of information that basically allows people to create their own automation solutions. Why do you have to depend on rich to provide it ? The whole idea of Rich and Poor is based on Scarcity of goods. When we enter the era of full automation, we will be able to convert Energy into any form of product without human intervention. Energy + AI = Products.
- danharaj 11y ago> The whole idea of Rich and Poor is based on Scarcity of goods. No, actually, it's based on ownership of the means of production.
- zerocrat 11y agoI found it interesting how Expedia is behind this study. I can see how this would help their bottom line. For those interested, source data for the study. https://images.trvl-media.com/media/content/expus/graphics/other/pdf/Expedia-VacationDeprivation2012.pdf https://images.trvl-media.com/media/content/expus/graphics/o...
- atorralb 11y agowhat about mexicans ? we work 12 hours and 6 days a week... make the calculations
- CyberDildonics 11y agoWas this study done by No Shit University?
- dang 11y agoYou've been posting unsubstantive and—worse—uncivil comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- CyberDildonics 11y agoFirst off that isn't really true. Second, do you ban them or do you threaten people with your tiny amount of sandbox internet power, because that's what this looks like.
- dang 11y agoUncivil comments like these break the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586136 Yes, we ban people: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20banned%20account https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... From now on, please post civilly and substantively or not at all.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoIt looks to me like you saw a downvoted comment and decided to pile on to gain a feeling of superiority in the one place you have authority. Maybe from now on you should just let people vote and keep your smug judgements to yourself.
- cft 11y agoI know that correlation does not imply causation, but EU GDP growth is the lowest in the world [1], while Asian is the highest. 1. https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/economic-dataworlds-gdp-growth-by-region https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/economic-dat...
- irixusr 11y agoThe EU block's GDP is also the highest in the world though, with little room to grow. Furthermore, the only Asian country if comparable GOP/capita is Japan which has smaller growth than Europe for two decades...
- TulliusCicero 11y agoSouth Korea has a similar GDP/capita to many European countries. Not the richer ones, but some countries in Southern or Eastern Europe.
- irixusr 11y agoSure S. Korea is great Taiwan also. But before insinuating that europe's economic woes are due to their summer holidays, I'd look at curroption and the like.
- smt88 11y agoI'd prefer to live in a country with low GDP growth and have an enjoyable life than kill myself with work.
- cft 11y agoBut your great grandchildren (if any) will prefer that you had different preferences.
- smt88 11y agoFirst of all, it may be a false tradeoff. There certainly is a lot of evidence that happy people with balanced lives are more productive. Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Australia have very high quality-of-life (according to the Economist Intelligence Unit) and very high per-capita GDP[1]. Note that Switzerland's and Australia's GDP per capita are more than double Japan's. Sweden's is close to double. Second, my grandchildren will be able to move to any country they want. If they prefer a soul-crushing job, they can easily find one. 1. https://trulysingapore.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/per-capita-gdp-ppp.png https://trulysingapore.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/per-capit...
- dogma1138 11y agoIs there some way to normalize this with average income per employee, number of public holidays, non-paid leave taken, actual average retirement age, and non standard vacations like sabbaticals (Pretty much everyone I ever known to take a sabbatical/career break for a year or so was from the US)? Because this would be actually quit interesting to check, otherwise it's just quite random correlation.
- SixSigma 11y agoGood on you Turkish, Chechens and Georgians. Uncle Joe Stalin would be proud of his fellow Asian descendants.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoNot sure what you wanted to convey, but Chechens live north of Caucasus mountains, which probably makes them Europeans. Now that's a scary idea.
- prodmerc 11y agoThey're about as European as the Albanians lol
- oblio 11y agoThe Albanians are one of the oldest population groups in Europe. They are descended from Paleo-Balkanic peoples.
- anon4 11y agoIf uncle Hitler has taught me anything, it's that people who aren't blond-eyed blue-haired Aryans are dirty non-European foreigners! /s
- prodmerc 11y agoWell, OK, I just recently learned they're an mostly Islamic country who love their gun culture. An odd combination for any "European" country, yet they're technically in Southern Europe. Nothing against it, really, but they don't fit in with the neighbors, for sure...
- oblio 11y agoFinns and Czechs also love their guns. And Albanians used to be Christians until they were converted under Ottoman rule. If you take any given coordinates available in Europe, you're bound to find oddballs. Oh, and regarding Islam, there's Wahhabism and there's the Ottoman-style Sunni Islam (I don't know the historic name for it). The two have little in common. The Muslims in Europe are 99% results of Ottoman influence. So European Muslims, especially in the Balkans, are quite moderate.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoWell, they could have just asked me (I lived in Europe, Asia, currently US), the answer would have been the same :)
- Oletros 11y agoIn Spain, the work law (Estatuto de los trabajadores) specifies a minimum of 30 natural days or 22 working days of vacation days so it is normal that you take them.
- CognitiveLens 11y agoIt's so strange when otherwise-rigorous research/reporting makes generalizations about "Asians", which is an incredibly diverse continent that is not defined by Japan, China, and South Korea. It's okay to be more specific - the data and conclusions would still be interesting even if they weren't trying to claim some magical cultural link among Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mongola, Singaport, Bangladesh, etc...
- dba7dba 11y agoI agree that 'Asia' includes very very different cultures. Asia really should really be divided into smaller chunks.
- fla 11y agoAs do Europe. Many different culutres and politics. France pretend to cap work at 35h/week, next to it is Switzerland where we have 20 days of vacation and 42h/week.
- skimmas 11y agoAnd then o look at the map and think... what does this title even mean?