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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. |