"What’s really rare, he adds, is his annual week of paid holiday"
I may be getting it wrong as I don't live in US, but does it mean he only gets one week of holidays per year? Is there any other form of paid off time?
>I may be getting it wrong as I don't live in US, but does it mean he only gets one week of holidays per year?
Yes, and even that is a rarity for wage workers.
>Is there any other form of paid off time?
Nope. Most hourly workers are lucky to get a few unpaid sick days. Have an accident, or get sick and need to spend a couple weeks in the hospital? Now you're unemployed and bankrupt.
I employ 5-10 unskilled people at any given time. Mostly for assembly and packing. They get two weeks PTO, and at least a week of paid vacation throughout the year when we close for holidays, mostly more.
At the end of the day the total annual cost to provide this is well worth the drama it keeps out of the workplace.
Sick days? Take as many as you need. I don’t want sick people at the office.
We all come into this with a lot of context. However, America has I think something like the highest average and median wages outside the Nordics [0, 1]. And the Nordics are potentially a statistical aberration.
If somebody "gets" 2 weeks of paid time off, but at the end of the year their average salary is (50/52)% of someone who gets no PTO, are they really being paid for time off? It doesn't look paid to me.
The real benefit would be a culture where you can take unpaid time off then return to the same job later on. The per-hour pay is likely to correct quietly via ye olde market forces, and everyone enjoys the best of all worlds. High pay if they want it, time off if they want it.
> If somebody "gets" 2 weeks of paid time off, but at the end of the year their average salary is (50/52)% of someone who gets no PTO, are they really being paid for time off? It doesn't look paid to me.
How much does it cost an american worker to take 2 weeks off? If that means unemployment, new job search and your own health care payments, it might be much more expensive than that.
> median wage ... OECD
any idea how they calculated the purchasing power for the US?
I pay hourly employees between $14-$20/hr. The standard is to let people accrue two weeks. I just give it all up front. It's easier this way, honestly, because people spend the time more evenly throughout the year. I guess I could reverse it so they are "earning" the PTO over time, but everyone seems happy with it the way things are, and that's fine by me.
For salaried employees I just give them an FTO policy instead. As long as things are getting done I just don't care. I'm not interesting in creating a hostile work environment to save a few thousand dollars a year.
What happens to the PTO at the rollover date?
Or if an employee accrues more PTO time than the employer will pay.
I'm not being caustic here im just wondering what happens to those funds?
It’s use it or lose it. After 60 days I just give two weeks up front and let people use it however they want. Every year I just rebank them up to two weeks. You can’t accrue more than that. Some people wait to get the rebank then quit and take the two week payout. Seems fair to me though.
And you'll attract and keep a better level of employee because you do this. IMO this is particularly important with unskilled labor as your pool of employees is so large with very little to differentiate quality people.
Costco does this and it has worked, at least it seems, really well for them.
Always maintained an above average hourly salary and benefits offering for retail staff. Their turnover is considerably lower than other big box retail (Walmart around 40%, Costco around 17%).
Not to mention the cost reduction of not having to retrain someone who is only going to quit/get fired in six months.
> Sick days? Take as many as you need. I don’t want sick people at the office.
I hire people trained or untrained for my shed manufacturing business. Younger (under 25 years) people try to pull the "my stomach is hurting" and take the rest of the day off. I tell them they need to go see the doctor and bring a note from the doctor excusing the time off they need for their sickness. Otherwise, I don't get decent workweeks out of them younglings.
If you're demanding they see a doctor then you should be paying for them to do it. Otherwise the employees are losing wages and paying additional fees for the privilege.
Unless an employee has demonstrated that they can't take leave appropriately, you really should get out of their business and let them use the benefits they're entitled to.
What you call a privilege and entitlement is not at all such.
I spent 6 years in the Air Force and the military sends you to sick call for you to be excused from duty. If an employee at MY business doesn't want to follow my policy for sick time, they are at liberty to work elsewhere or not at all.
I have never worked an hourly paid job in the UK that has paid holiday.
I'm not sure they exist, it's sort of what hourly pay is - you get it when you work and not when you don't.
Personally I'm not sure it's something that makes sense, it should just be factored in to the wage. Most hourly paid jobs I know of don't have regular hours, even - how much do you pay for a week's holiday when some weeks the employee works 8 hours and some 24 hours? An average? Of what, if they've only been there a few months, say?
Now, time off, e.g. whether someone practically actually can take time off during the year without being sacked, is a different matter entirely.
Historically (before my career as a software developer) whenever I've felt like I need a bit of time out I've either had to negotiate it or just leave. It's usually far easier to quit a job than to convince your manager to let you go away for a few weeks. Sometimes the bureaucracy doesn't even, well, understand it.
I am personally completely convinced that the only answer to these sorts of issues is just to pay people properly. If they choose to chuck the money away regardless, it's on them.
Building some savings early in my adult life and maintaining them has been the best thing I've ever done. It turns the matter of "does this job offer holiday" "can I get the weekend off" stuff into an academic concern because you are in control.
What does paid holiday mean, exactly, in a zero-hour contract? If there's no guaranteed minimum rate at which one is paid during any given period, it seems like there can be no way to assert that one is on "paid leave".
According to the gov.uk page above, it's based on the actual hours worked: if you've accumulated X hours since start of the calculation period, you get the appropriate amount of time allocated. Presumably they can just like normal employees request time off for a specific time, and get paid for their time during that? For people only having very few hours, it seems weird, but if someone gets scheduled a lot the right to block out time seems relevant.
> People working irregular hours (like shift workers or term-time workers) are entitled to paid time off for every hour they work. They need to calculate their leave entitlement for irregular hours.
Edit: I'm not asking about the rate at which paid leave builds up, I'm asking about how the employee can ever be said to have used it up. Given that zero-hours contracts are a Bad Thing, I don't expect this to make any sense.
If I have accrued 24 hours of paid leave, and potentially work 6hrs a day, typically one day a week, do I need to pre-emptively use all of those 24 hours just to take leave for a block of 4 weekdays? It seems like I might have to, in the face of an unscrupulous employer.
while this is mechanically true everywhere i look it isnt a comprehensive implementation of managing varieties of types of people toward the betterment of humanity
Turns out you're right. I can't edit the post as the time has passed.
I've actually just never taken holiday from an hourly job, since it wouldn't have made sense at the time (if I were aware I would have probably tried to fill the time with more work.. )
I assume then that I should have been paid in my final pay. Ten years back now, I've been contracting or salaried since.
> Personally I'm not sure it's something that makes sense, it should just be factored in to the wage. Most hourly paid jobs I know of don't have regular hours, even - how much do you pay for a week's holiday when some weeks the employee works 8 hours and some 24 hours? An average? Of what, if they've only been there a few months, say?
If you want full time hourly employees (40 hours per week) to earn two weeks of paid vacation per year, then you have hourly workers accrue vacation time at a rate of 1 hour vacation earned for every 25 hours on the clock.
This system handles people who hours worked varies from week to week, and it handles people who have not been there long enough to earn the full two weeks--ever 5 weeks they have accumulated a vacation day, so if they want to take a week off 6 months in, say, that works.
It also works for tracking vacation time for salaried employees. For salaried employees you just force the hours worked to 8 per day in the program that calculates vacation accrual, regardless of the actual hours worked (assuming that you even track actual hours worked for salaried employees).
I think you're missing the point another poster brought up which is that a "holiday hour" for a real hourly worker (e.g. one with flexible hours, shift work etc) is nebulous.
So let's say under your system an employee works an average of 8 hours a week. After half a year they've accrued 8 hours of holiday.
That's 1 day.
The pay isn't the issue but the legal obligation to allow the worker to not work, if that makes sense.
Whether holidays are unpaid or paid is just shuffling cashflow in time, the real problem is the amount of holiday that's possible.
A part-time/ZHC worker in the UK doesn't work a set number of days a week.
They're assigned a variable number of hours per week. It might be 4 this week, 20 the next, 0 after that, etc.
You wait for the rota and work what you've been assigned.
It's kind of like a lower-level version of being on call.
It only really even works in the first place because we have all sorts of insane welfare subsidies that mean people have their income topped up to make up the shortfall.
As mentioned downthread, this is the unfortunate combination of the British English term (“holiday”) which American English replaces with “vacation”.
There are a set of Federal Holidays, but the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require that all workers get them off nor that they are paid [1]. There are some holidays that are Federal Holidays but are generally not observed nationwide (e.g., Colombus Day), however, banks and financial institutions including the stock market may be closed for them.
Most workers get about 10 weekdays off per year from these federal holidays (Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, etc.) but at the low end (think fast food worker) that’s often not the case. Particularly part-time workers often get nothing. A comment downthread suggests that 23% of workers get no vacation time, but that might or might not also mean “and no Federal Holidays”.
I believe in theory they don't have to give any paid time off, no vacation, no sick days. I once was offered a job in NYC with 5 days vacation, increasing to 10 after a few years. I said "No, thank you". I can't even imagine how it is to work like that.
I interviewed for a ton of positions recently because I was about to be laid off. I got to see the entire gamut of offers from "no PTO, no benefits, and a pittance" to "fully paid benefits, 18 days PTO, and top 10% salary for location".
I can't imagine the difference in quality between the guys who are getting nothing and made to fend for themselves and the ones who are getting taken care of. I'm going to go out on a limb to say it might not necessarily be a giant difference depending on how well the developer in question Luckily for me, the job at the most financially rewarding location seemed just as interesting as the ones who appeared to be bootstrapping themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hang on. So even if you have paid leave, is a yearly week or two's holiday really not usual in the US? You know to go spend a week hiking or skiing in the Rockies, or fortnight camping, or whatever is your thing.
Not being able to take a week or two straight to get away from civilisation would have me clawing the walls going stir crazy, and I'd probably find myself divorced. Quite apart from the practicality - a long weekend isn't going to work to visit Europe or anything remotely long haul. Even a weekend break taking in the Grand Canyon if you happen to be on the east coast barely works, it certainly isn't going to leave any time to chill and unwind.
If you only have two weeks total, getting two weeks straight is very hard, because you've probably had to use vacation days for other things, family obligations, christmas, etc, so you don't really have the time.
Fair point. I'm am so used to the statutory days paid provision as separate and extra from how many days holiday we get - Xmas, Boxing Day, Easter, August Bank Holiday etc.
So we always built around 9 day or 16 day breaks, and everyone else seems to. There's usually a few holiday days left over for the odd day off. Some places didn't even count the compassionate things or family emergencies towards holiday entitlement days. Heck, when I was contracting, we took a few - obviously unpaid - one month holidays!
>Not being able to take a week or two straight to get away from civilisation would have me clawing the walls going stir crazy, and I'd probably find myself divorced.
That's interesting, as I recall many couples get divorced after being on vacation together because they spend most of the year separated but they discover during vacation that they can't stand each other.
I always heard as Xmas - particularly the big family Xmas - as the biggest trigger stressor for divorce.
Everyone here is taking one or two two holidays a year with their partner, as well as several long weekends and all the statutory holidays such as Xmas, Easter etc, yet divorce seems broadly comparable across the globe. Even if a few of those are only lazing in the back garden or redecorating the lviing room.
Being prevented from doing any of that with partner by an employer in the dark ages would also be a divorce stressor. If one partner takes a job with shite holiday provision, the other - also used to civilised holiday provision - is likely to end up resentful, no?
EDIT: And note, lots of workers don't get separate paid sick leave, and those that do get very small allotments compared to anywhere else in the developed world.
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.
Paid leaves aren't mandated by law. The norm is two weeks for salaried workers. Most people don't used them up anyway. There's no tradition of everyone going on vacation in the same month in the US. That makes people feel somewhat guilty leaving their jobs behind. Even while on vacation many end up working.
Americans do switch jobs more frequently. People have more occasions to unwind between jobs (perhaps cashing out their unused leaves to pay for a big trip).
Another reason for not using them up is that one of the times of year that many people do often want to take time off during has a lot of paid holiday days already for many people, so you can get a large block of time off only using a few vacation days.
I'm speaking of Christmas/New Year, which many people like to take off to be with family.
At many places, Christmas and the day before are paid holidays, and at many places New Years and the day before are also paid holidays.
Suppose that in a given year you get a Tuesday and Wednesday off for the Christmas holidays and Tuesday and Wednesday off next week for New Years.
With one day of vacation (Monday), you turn the Christmas holiday into a block of 5 consecutive days off (2 weekend days, 1 vacation day, 2 holidays). Toss in 2 more vacation days (Thursday and Friday), and now for a cost of 3 vacation days you 9 consecutive days off.
Add another vacation day next Monday, and four a total cost of 4 vacation days you get 12 consecutive days off. 6 vacation days will get you 16 consecutive days off.
If you job is such that it naturally gets a lot less busy during the holidays, and it is possible to do it remotely, you might even convince your employer to work at home on some of those days, which will be such light work that it does not interfere with your vacation activities, but counts as a work day, not a vacation day.
I've usually been able to do that at least one day each week--check some logs, run some scripts that fix some database problems that some old crappy legacy code that no one ever gets the time to rewrite cause, spend 10 minutes or so figuring out to fix a couple things the scripts cannot, and then just check work email a few times during the day to look for anything else that comes up (which usually is nothing), and my employer will let me call that a work day...and so I can get those 16 consecutive days off with only 4 days vacation used.
Even if you are only earning two weeks (10 days) of vacation a year, if you take you vacations as above it is easy to end up accumulating them.
While people might switch jobs more often, is that supported by data that they use this time to unwind? You end up without health insurance coverage during that gap so I can’t imagine tons of people going in that direction.
From what I have seen most people leave their job on Friday and start the new one next Monday. Almost nobody takes time off. Also, a lot of companies want you to start tomorrow. I have told companies that I want to take a month off before starting there and it seemed they couldn't even comprehend the concept.
There's COBRA although, of course, you don't have the employer portion paid for any longer.
I'm a bit skeptical that the typical person takes a lot of time off between jobs. If you've already got a position lined up, your new employer probably wants you to start as soon as possible. You can probably negotiate 2 or 3 weeks but, in most cases, I expect a real sabbatical would be tough.
And, if you don't have a job lined up, I probably wouldn't be confident enough to just take it easy for a couple months.
There certainly are a lot of Americans who mismanage their finances. Standard advice is to have at least six months of saving at your disposal. If you can't take a afford a break at a time of your own choosing then how are you going to cope when you get laid off during a recession?
It's one thing to have a reserve for emergencies and another to tap into that reserve because you want to take a few months off before looking for a new job. Though absolutely nothing wrong with that if you're in the position to do so and it's a priority.
But I've always taken a lot of vacation, including a number of trips up to a month while working. The one time recently when I had a job lined up I did push things out a few weeks which was just fine. The time before that was in the middle of the dot-com bubble bursting and I considered myself lucky to get something fairly quickly; it could easily have been many months+.
There are no requirements for vacation days. However, by using the term 'holiday' it may be mixing things up slightly. In the US, you may get a holiday off (eg, bank holiday such as Christmas or New Year's Day), in addition to "paid time off" or "vacation" days that you use at your discretion.
I only have a few anecdotal data points of what well paid hourly work is like in the US. But, most well paid hourly jobs with benefits etc. have some combination of:
Holidays: Federal holidays where people are off and they still get paid as if they were working.
Vacation: Time off work that is paid that is accrued during the time you are working. When you submit your time, you can use your vacation hours.
Sick: Days that you are suppose to either be unable to work or have a dependent (or spouse) that you need to take care of. Depending on the company, they can require doctor’s notes.
Many companies lump sick and vacation as “paid time off”.
Companies usually have paid bereavement leave.
I’ve worked as a contractor occasionally with none of these types of time off, but fortunately, I am in a position to adjust my rate accordingly.
Even when I was in college and working retail we had some type of minimum holiday pay.
Everyone else is throwing out their experiences, so since none mentioned something like mine I may as well too:
Back in highschool, I worked hourly at a library for a year, and don't recall getting any paid vacation time. What I do remember is trading days with co-workers so I could get a full week off on occasion, or once just giving them my days so they got paid more that week with no pay loss another week.
Oftentimes the lowest paid workers end up working the days everyone else has off. Heaven forbid the Walmart or the Kohl’s be closed on any holiday but basically Christmas Day.
This typically means 5 paid days off per year. The rest is maybe paid holiday that other people get like Christmas. All other days taken off are unpaid and subject to approval. This was what I got at my first office job in the US.
Simply not true. Every 12 months I get three weeks PTO and three weeks sick leave (which is also paid and not connected to my vacation time). PTO will soon jump to 4 weeks after another year of working at my job.
I know it isn't this good for everyone, but to say that working in the US sucks for everyone is a ridiculous statement.
Of course “everyone” is never true. But for example in The Netherlands, 4.5 weeks of paid leave is the bare minimum (like even if you flip burgers you get at least that). If you’re e sick, you get paid leave for multiple months and after that, still 70% is paid. Your health endurance is not held hostage by your employer; for a small monthly fee (< $50 if you have a low income job) you’re pretty much ensured health issues won’t ruin you financially.
Every country has their own Stockholm Syndromes where they think they’ve got it made, while actually other places are doing a lot better. I think employment and benefits are one of these for the US.
Eh, not necessarily. In my field (tech-related), I make substantially more than I would in the Netherlands and my tax burden is also substantially lower. I get 4 weeks of PTO plus 10 holidays every year and I never use it all. That is certainly not what everyone would prefer, but it suits me just fine.
Having that little leave is literally illegal here (Ireland, minimum 20 days per year). Sick leave has its limits, but they're so irrelevant that I don't even know what they are.
Not everyone. Most salaried jobs have at least two weeks paid vacation and 10 paid holidays. This is also true for decently paid full time hourly workers.
Yes, and even that is a rarity for wage workers.
>Is there any other form of paid off time?
Nope. Most hourly workers are lucky to get a few unpaid sick days. Have an accident, or get sick and need to spend a couple weeks in the hospital? Now you're unemployed and bankrupt.