America’s national vacation problem
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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It's not even like it takes a bad economy. "We made record profits and met all our targets, but sacking people is what analysts want to hear this year. Security have your things at the front desk."
Note, I don't quite think a company should "be loyal" when it's in dire financial problems. The only loyalty they can provide at that point is to the few employees it can keep.
Does it imply a Quid Pro Quo, "if you are loyal, whatever that means, you'll benefit personally from it"?
And even if I think that it is right that laws allow companies to fire people when they need it, it should never be easy or cheap. Being able to fire at will makes a nation of slaves that must always obey their employers unless they want to risk themselves to loose everything.
I've had people try to hand back vacation days - but I've never had anyone try to hand back salary.
Personally I try to take all my vacation because, as a professional, I have an obligation to make sure the company could keep going if I change jobs or get hit by a bus. Doing routine tests for bus factor resiliency is as important as testing your backups restore and your backup power works right :)
Why aren't you keeping colleagues informed enough to cope without you for even a week.
Why are you the only person contactable for certain issues. etc.
Drives me mad when schools shut for summer and the only person who can purchase things has sodded off.
One of the best pieces of advice I was given very early in my career was 'If you can't be replaced then you can't be fired, but you can't be promoted either.'
Being indispensable is a career limiting move.
Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.
And if your company absolutely 100% relies on having a full-blown PM/DS/DBA around at all times, well, then you DO need (at least) two of each, otherwise your company tanks if your one DBA gets sick or leaves for a company where they don't have to suffer the permanent stress of being a SPOF.
And if you CAN survive for a few weeks while you hire and train a new DBA in that situation, then you can survive for a few weeks while your DBA is on holiday.
Except "coping" isn't what everyone thinks about, there's some bizarre expectation of 100% efficiency for short notice things. If the DBA needs a week off then plan around it. I can see a case in a small firm for some people to be contactable in case of dire emergencies - but with significant costs like holiday day reimbursement and cash if activated. Not an expectation of any contact, view that as a significant failing.
Some will die due to those risks. Most likely the right way to mitigate those risks is not European style work/life balance but rather Valley style "pay the SPOF a lot, give him ownership, and make him feel highly valued".
That's very true, and sometimes the best business decision is one that favours staff retention over short term profit. Losing the experience and expertise of someone who's been in the company a while just because you can't manage your team well enough to get people trained to cover one another's vacation time is going to get expensive when people burn out and quit, not to mention the effect it'll have on staff morale and your business's reputation as a bad place to work (which has a knock-on effect on sales).
You're entirely right that a small business can't afford to have complete redundancy for every staff position - the appropriate strategy is to put well documented processes in place, with good handover management and proper knowledge sharing. Discouraging people from taking vacation time to the point where you'd only hire in countries where you can give your staff zero paid vacation days is not.
Just flout the law?
If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery/business-friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?
I have absolutely no idea why you wish to portray slavery as economically efficient. Is it truly your belief that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved? (I suppose this is not a particularly uncommon left wing view, but it's very rarely stated so explicitly.)
It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that and I certainly hope for your sake that you don't believe anyone believes that and are just trying to be incendiary. It is a very common view among most people (since it's the truth) that the welfare of /certain people/ is maximized with /certain other people/ enslaved. And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
The contention is that your position, that businesses should refuse to operate in countries which regulate rights into existence since these rights have costs which hurt the bottom line of the business, if adopted leads directly and immediately to slavery. Slavery is unquestionably disgusting and reprehensible, so therefore your position, which leads to an unacceptable result, cannot be accepted.
So I'm suggesting that the /subjective/ welfare of people in a position to own slaves (wealthy business owners) is maximized under slavery. And from that I conclude the maximization of the welfare of wealthy business owners -- the natural result of unfettered capitalism -- is something to be categorically rejected. So we need fetters.
Simply not true. Several elected officials believe or previously believed that, and some proposed legislation for that purpose:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_National_Service_Act
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/236365-rangel-renews-call-...
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr5741/text
http://www.infowars.com/obama-camp-scrubs-website-to-remove-...
And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.
Yet strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. Multinationals with huge economic power and subject to minimal regulation tend to treat employees better than smaller and weaker local companies (at least in India, the US, and other places I'm familiar with).
I don't dispute much of what you wrote about why we shouldn't do business with those who practice slavery. I'd draw a very clear bright line: do workers agree to their terms of work? In India or the US, the vast majority of IT workers do. I guess you want to go further and tell my employer/me what work conditions are acceptable?
I think the reason multinationals treat employees better is because that since they are multinational, they are a single company subject to the laws of every nation: it is more efficient for them to treat EVERYONE by the same rights as the most stringent (Europe) whereas companies local to India or the US can abuse the lack of rights these countries give workers since they only deal with local workers.
And I would agree with you about consent being the big bright line. Except I think consent is very complicated. If you allowed people to sign themselves into slavery, people would consent to slavery. No matter how awful something is, if it's allowed, people will "consent" to it -- the most desperate in society are forced by circumstances to consent to it. I think the word consent only has meaning when there are other meaningful options available. Which I think is the fundamental difference: the definition of consent. We all agree if someone puts a gun to your head and demands consent it's not consent: but what if a faceless nameless system forces you to die or consent to whatever some collection of business owners demand and you agree: is this consent or not? I say not really.
I would have no concerns hiring someone and telling them "hey, I'm paying you well because I need you available all the time, just in case." They will almost certainly lack the ability to use the legal system to screw me over.
I prefer the employer just to be upfront and if I want to work from home then I'll negotiate to do that once a week upfront.
As in, if you haven't taken any vacation when December rolls in, see you after new year's.
There is usually a set amount of paid sick leave as well (think it various across industries, but there are legal minimums.) Most places do not require a doctor's certificate for two or less days sick, unless they are adjacent to a public holiday.
(I've never heard of anyone being able to substitute sick days while on vacation though.)
Having said that, contract employees are only paid for the days they attend, and they tend to take much fewer days off in the US than UK based contractors, typically maybe 2-5 or so per year. But that's their decision.
A lot of banks have removed this requirement now, but the culture of planning vacations remains in that industry.
"Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Produce More: A Study in Culture"
http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours-but...
Some people will certainly do it, but not everybody.
Downside is that one time I was "let go" while out of the country and told I didn't need to come back to the office. I guess sometimes the vacation days in your contract are more of a threat than a perk.
I'd far rather be able to really focus on work, really getting stuff done, not have to deal with coworkers all being on vacation, saving hard for retirement or whatever, and then every couple years, go off and do something completely different (paid or unpaid).
And I'm certainly not saying this from a "this proves American workers are the most hardworking" junk attitude. I simply find life more enjoyable this way.
Then, that's my young, single self talking. Perhaps with a family moderation is more important.
EDIT: People are misunderstanding my post, assuming I mean I don't do anything but work. On the contrary I've been to 30+ countries, lived in 5, biked across Asia, spent a year teaching English in Korea. This is difficult with just "vacation time". PLUS this style allows me to be really focused on / interested in my work when I'm in that phase of life.
It's good for productivity, health, and well-being if people get to disconnect completely from work. As a company, it doesn't even make sense to have people work like you do, because they are more creative and productive if they do take time off.
One study reported on here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2014/02/28/take-a-vaca... – and there are plenty of similar results elsewhere.
But, by all means, if this is how you enjoy life then go right ahead. I and many other people wouldn't like that lifestyle though.
I am very happy I have six weeks of vacation and I have to take them or get written up. To me, there's more to life than delivering the next iteration of some product.
It's ok if you like it that way now. The problem with that much focus on work is, that if the work is gone nothing is left.
The most extreme case is if people enter retirement and they literally have no more meaning in their life, because they never learned living without work.
Don't get me wrong: I like working. But the bottomline is that I'm working to live. I'm not living to work.
Go to Glasgow instead and take a look at Dali's _Christ of Saint John of the Cross_ instead. It's huge and absolutely stunning.
You mean, like take a vacation? You are saying exactly the same thing but with the time-scale different. I agree on that: work hard for 10 months, no days off. 2 months completely out of the office. But that assumes excellent health and no family.
My ideal would be to do something like http://technomancy.us/, one of the big developers at Heroku, who is taking time off with his family to go do missionary work in rural Thailand, teaching his kids electronics, and meanwhile supporting himself selling custom keyboards.
Get your shit together // Sweden.
I work a very honest 80 hours per two-week pay period, and use my 4 weeks of annual leave far removed (at least mentally) from the workplace. Seldom do I feel any push back on that, either.
First off 7 French natives have told me the minimum is 2 months. 3 work at Nintendo of France and brought this up in relation to their Japanese co-workers in Japan. Even though Nintendo is a Japanese company it has to abide by French laws for it's office in Paris. 1 works at a Nuclear Power Plant. She's the one that gets 4 months off a year. Yes, she actually gets 4 months off paid vacation. This is not a lie. 3 others are currently working in Japan, 2 in Kyoto, 1 in Tokyo, not working for French companies, frustrated at the lack of vacation relative to France. They might have been wrong but that's what they believe.
Second it doesn't matter if it's 40 days off a year or 25. That's still INFINITELY MORE THAN THE USA which is has a mandatory minimum of ZERO days off and still entirely makes the point that lots more vacation than is typical in the USA is at least something to be considered.