[esotericn]

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.

[tptacek]

If you work 1 day a week, after half a year you can still take a week off; your 1 vacation day, added to the 4 other workdays you don't work.

[esotericn]

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.

I would imagine something like this must exist in the US. A quick google brought up https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-work-irregular-hou... which sounds basically like what exists here.