[unsigner]

14, not 13 salaries a year. There are the normal monthly salaries, then there are an "Easter" and a "Christmas" salary.

I learned of this via something almost out of a ancient Greek comedy, the lines of the Goddess of irony:

A Greek manager sent to manage an branch created here in Bulgaria to take advantage our cheaper labor was outraged when she found out we only get 12 salaries a year. How is she expected to live on only 12 salaries, she asked incredulously, what about the extra spending around vacations??

[ptaipale]

I think that it is not very relevant whether civil servants get 12, 13 or 14 monthly salaries per year. The schedule of pay packages is just an artifact of history.

What matters is the annual salary (or total cost of employment). This can then be split into e.g. 12, 13 or 14 - I don't care - payment lots. But if the total salary package of civil servants is something that the government cannot afford, then that is the problem.

Is that anecdote about a Greek manager in Bulgaria real? If there indeed are such managers, they are definitely very silly not to understand how different the terms of employment may be in different countries. The practices in your home country may be not at all relevant somewhere else, and this is not just the pay packages, but also days off, terms of laying off people, what things like health care is included, and so on and so on.

We have a stereotype that Americans are particularly ignorant of the rest of the world in this respect, but I don't know if that stereotype is really justified.

(FWIW, our annual gross pay in Finland is typically 12.5 monthly salaries; the .5 monthly salary is paid out at holiday seasons, typically in the summer. The creation of these bonuses are related to the economic situation in 1960's and 1970's: during their summer holiday, many people took a temp job in Sweden, and pay in Sweden was so much better that once there, many decided to stay. A "return bonus" was commissioned in Finland after negotiations between employers and employee unions, to motivate people come back to their normal jobs at end of annual leave. This has since those times transformed into a part of the regular compensation package for everyone. In shorter employments, you earn both holiday days and the holiday bonuses, which are then paid out typically at end of employment if you're not in a regular job.)

[_delirium]

That's not too uncommon in Europe. In Denmark we also get something like 13.5 monthly salary payments. In order to ensure that all workers have extra cash flow around the time of the summer vacation [1], the Danish Holiday Act (Ferieloven) requires an extra salary payment about 6 weeks before the normal summer holiday period, equal to 12.5% of the annual "regular" salary (i.e. 1.5 normal monthly salaries). Well, modulo some complexity: in some arrangements a part of that money may go to a communal holiday fund run by your union instead, which uses it to operate vacation property that workers can use free or cheaply, and only half or so might be paid out to the worker in cash. But in any case, everyone gets 13 salary payments of some kind.

[1] It's an important part of Danish culture that everyone, of all social classes, should take a contiguous 3-week vacation in the summertime.

[father_of_two]

Average workers' monthly pay (year/12) as of 2013 for some of the UE28 countries, in euros:

  DK 3739
  LU 3009
  FI 2622
  IE 2621 
  DE 2574
  ES 1634
  GR 1028
  PT 984
  HR 848
  PL 693
  BG 316