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Usually, low-skill hourly wage service jobs in the US have no paid leave, at all. If you work N hours, you get paid for N hours. That’s why getting one week o

Usually, low-skill hourly wage service jobs in the US have no paid leave, at all. If you work N hours, you get paid for N hours. That’s why getting one week of paid leave annually was described as rare.

Barrin92 7y ago
Jesus I didn't know that. I knew that the US had a debate about maternity leave, but I thought the US had paid annual leave. Here in Germany everyone gets 24 working days off, I don't think I'd survive a year without it.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Even for high-paid white-collar jobs, you normally don't get a lot of paid time off in the US. Two weeks, typically. Three weeks is seen as generous. These days off are then typically used piecemeal, a day here, a long weekend there, some days around christmas, a family trip here. A whole week off is seen as weird. I worked at a company where that was the standard, but every five years (!) you could apply for a whole month (!!) of unpaid (!!!) time off. I witnessed discussions on the employee blabbing mailing list where people who had worked there for five years or ten were talking about what they would do, and how a whole month of not working would affect them and some were not sure if they could stay away that long... Meanwhile, in Sweden, I had six weeks of paid time off every year, and everyone has a legal right to four consecutive weeks in the summer, so most people take a month off every year. Not every five years. Everyone. The cultural difference is absolutely crazy. A second-order effect of this is that if people are gone a lot every year, it forces companies to have better redundancies, it forces companies to spread knowledge around, it forces them to make sure that everyone's job can be covered by someone else. This lessens the impact of someone quitting, because there should be people around who can at least somewhat do that person's job, so you are less likely to end up in a situation where someone quitting is a disaster for the company, because that person had made themselves essential as a crazy sort of job security.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    A whole week off is not seen as weird in most of the US. I’ve had 3-4 weeks of vacation for decades and I’ve always taken pretty much every day. Among many of the people I’ve known that was by no means unusual.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Sorry for generalizing. In my experience, it was very rare for people to use up all their vacation, and people were routinely used to being denied vacation time for whatever business reason, both at my company, and previous companies. Don't know how common it is across Silicon Valley, but it exists at least. We had to push people into taking vacations in my team, and we never, ever denied vacation requests, as long as people had earned the time off. I really wish people were more pushy about their vacation time, because they've earned it, just like they've earned their salary. Not taking vacation time is essentially giving money to your company, which is dumb, because you get nothing in return.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        I totally agree. Based on numbers I've seen people in the US do better than their stereotype. But a lot of people still leave vacation on the table in a way that is foreign to me. Sure, some companies are dysfunctional in this respect. But, it's also true that at a company I worked at for a long time where I pretty much saved up my vacation for month trips on a number of occasions, a fair number of people couldn't really understand how I could do this. (My managers had no problems and I did quite well there for over a decade.) In all fairness, I've also worked with people who didn't like to travel and got bored with staycations so they didn't take much of their time. Alien to me but I sorta get it to some degree.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      11 days for salaried employees is the average. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and-pay-do-employees-get-2064018 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and... Anecdotally, I’ve had one job in the past 20 years that didn’t have at least 15 days PTO. Because of corporate policy, they wouldn’t budge. I asked for extra pay to compensate.
- MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  Even for a lot of white collar jobs, you will get 8 days total paid time off the first year, usually either pro-rated or earned on a percentage basis as you work. Large companies of European origin with a unionized staff tend to be vastly more generous with retirement. My new employer offers 3 weeks of vacation plus 3 days of PTO. That's it. Everyone at the senior level and above gets that. If I had worked for my dad's employer with a similar amount of seniority, I'd be looking at 4-5 bankable weeks of vacation each year. His employer routinely offered negotiated severance for people with X years of employment. He took one of their packages. They paid him 2 years salary complete with healthcare coverage and 401k for those years, and then he was able to use his accumulated vacation. He went into the office twice in 4 months and then cleared out his desk before retiring to a nice pension.

Barrin92 7y ago

Jesus I didn't know that. I knew that the US had a debate about maternity leave, but I thought the US had paid annual leave. Here in Germany everyone gets 24 working days off, I don't think I'd survive a year without it.

henrikschroder 7y ago
Even for high-paid white-collar jobs, you normally don't get a lot of paid time off in the US. Two weeks, typically. Three weeks is seen as generous. These days off are then typically used piecemeal, a day here, a long weekend there, some days around christmas, a family trip here. A whole week off is seen as weird. I worked at a company where that was the standard, but every five years (!) you could apply for a whole month (!!) of unpaid (!!!) time off. I witnessed discussions on the employee blabbing mailing list where people who had worked there for five years or ten were talking about what they would do, and how a whole month of not working would affect them and some were not sure if they could stay away that long... Meanwhile, in Sweden, I had six weeks of paid time off every year, and everyone has a legal right to four consecutive weeks in the summer, so most people take a month off every year. Not every five years. Everyone. The cultural difference is absolutely crazy. A second-order effect of this is that if people are gone a lot every year, it forces companies to have better redundancies, it forces companies to spread knowledge around, it forces them to make sure that everyone's job can be covered by someone else. This lessens the impact of someone quitting, because there should be people around who can at least somewhat do that person's job, so you are less likely to end up in a situation where someone quitting is a disaster for the company, because that person had made themselves essential as a crazy sort of job security.
- ghaff 7y ago
  A whole week off is not seen as weird in most of the US. I’ve had 3-4 weeks of vacation for decades and I’ve always taken pretty much every day. Among many of the people I’ve known that was by no means unusual.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Sorry for generalizing. In my experience, it was very rare for people to use up all their vacation, and people were routinely used to being denied vacation time for whatever business reason, both at my company, and previous companies. Don't know how common it is across Silicon Valley, but it exists at least. We had to push people into taking vacations in my team, and we never, ever denied vacation requests, as long as people had earned the time off. I really wish people were more pushy about their vacation time, because they've earned it, just like they've earned their salary. Not taking vacation time is essentially giving money to your company, which is dumb, because you get nothing in return.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      I totally agree. Based on numbers I've seen people in the US do better than their stereotype. But a lot of people still leave vacation on the table in a way that is foreign to me. Sure, some companies are dysfunctional in this respect. But, it's also true that at a company I worked at for a long time where I pretty much saved up my vacation for month trips on a number of occasions, a fair number of people couldn't really understand how I could do this. (My managers had no problems and I did quite well there for over a decade.) In all fairness, I've also worked with people who didn't like to travel and got bored with staycations so they didn't take much of their time. Alien to me but I sorta get it to some degree.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    11 days for salaried employees is the average. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and-pay-do-employees-get-2064018 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and... Anecdotally, I’ve had one job in the past 20 years that didn’t have at least 15 days PTO. Because of corporate policy, they wouldn’t budge. I asked for extra pay to compensate.
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
Even for a lot of white collar jobs, you will get 8 days total paid time off the first year, usually either pro-rated or earned on a percentage basis as you work. Large companies of European origin with a unionized staff tend to be vastly more generous with retirement. My new employer offers 3 weeks of vacation plus 3 days of PTO. That's it. Everyone at the senior level and above gets that. If I had worked for my dad's employer with a similar amount of seniority, I'd be looking at 4-5 bankable weeks of vacation each year. His employer routinely offered negotiated severance for people with X years of employment. He took one of their packages. They paid him 2 years salary complete with healthcare coverage and 401k for those years, and then he was able to use his accumulated vacation. He went into the office twice in 4 months and then cleared out his desk before retiring to a nice pension.