But if you ask for more vacation when you're hired, you're told you're not high enough on some invisible seniority list despite all your previous years of experience working other places.
I had to use 1 week of my 2 weeks PTO to go support my wife having a child in the hospital. It was complete BS. I was so angry at my boss, furiously angry that he would treat me and my family with such utter disrespect as to take away my hard-earned vacation time simply because my wife needed my support.
Paternity leave? What's that?
I know it's not PTO, but there are certain qualifying events that allow you to take extended leave from work without repercussion. It includes childbirth and medical conditions where a family member needs care. It's the Family Medical Leave Act[0]. The shitty part is that it's unpaid, so if you can't afford to take 1/2/3 month(s) of absence without pay, it's useless to you.
Well, I work for a small MSP, so... unfortunately the government screwed me. Surprise, surprise. Either way, unpaid paternity leave is still ridiculous, no other country in the world does that that I'm aware of.
http://edd.ca.gov/Disability/About_PFL.htm
I wish it were longer, and I wish it paid more, and I wish it were federal, but it's better than nothing.
So much of our society punishes you for illness, and it's sad.
On the other hand most employers are pretty chill WRT the G-Grand-Ops post if you answer your phone for emergency calls once in awhile, then going to the dentist once in awhile during the day is simply handwaved away. Home with a sick kid is handwaved away as "VPN working from home day".
Another interesting strategy if working outside "tech" is to work for an employer with a union, I'm not in the bargaining unit and I'm on salary and if my results and goal metrics are good there is literally no comment to make WRT car repair appointments or something. I'm not on the union timeclock, I have written defined long term goals and metrics, and where I'm sitting at precisely 3:35pm on Tuesday is definitely not one of them.
Obviously life is different in ops or hell desk which often has an abusive call center like atmosphere.
Rather than paternity leave, why not more general leave for everyone?
Unless your parents were heavy smokers, and you are the youngest of many siblings, you're probably going to take parental leave for all your kids before taking bereavement leave for either parent. If you base the leave on some kind of verifiable qualifying event, the accounting would probably be satisfied by the company paying premiums to an insurer. So you could give people time off whenever they are likely to be very distracted from work.
It doesn't just have to be because a crying baby is making an ordinary sleep schedule impossible. Jury duty with sequestration could be distracting. A tornado or house fire might be a bit stressful. Having your car totaled might be worth a few days off to sort out the crisis during regular business hours.
I'm not really very personally invested in parental leave any more, now that I think maybe I won't have to change any more diapers until the first grandchild. But I can think of all kinds of hypothetical circumstances beyond my direct control that might cause me to take some PTO here and there, which can easily chisel away the amount of actual vacation I can take, until I'm down to maybe extending a 3-day [holiday] weekend into 5 consecutive days away from work, and then not getting sick for the next 3 months.
That's not the kind of leave that reverses burnout.
Alternately, maybe just flush the PTO experiment into the toilet of history, reinstitute sick leave and true vacation, and give people enough of each that they can absorb those life events that eventually happen to everyone.
This is what I propose, although you say it more eloquently. Rather than trying to carve out cases, why not offer x months of time off for every y unit of time? Those who want to spend that time with their kids can do that. Why should I remain chained to my desk because that's not what I want to do?
My employer has a strict 9 to 5 attendance policy (which I disagree with for a number of reasons), but one thing that really bugs me about it is that it applies to days when the roads are hard to navigate due to winter weather. Even if there's a state of emergency and the roads are "closed", we're expected to be here because our customers are all around the country, and they didn't have a snow storm, so we need to be here to support them.
Employees with children tend to get leniency in terms of coming in late on days like that, typically because they had to arrange alternative care for their kids with schools closed. But I have no kids, so if I get stuck behind a snow plow and end up getting to the office at 9:05 I'm probably going to get a lecture on how being late is me being disrespectful to the boss and the company.
At least until the robots replace most of us.
You can choose not to eat food, but the individual will not last long.
You can choose not to have kids but the society won't last long.
It's in our interest to support the human part of humanity. We do that with breaks, meal breaks, sick time, vacation time, and other things. But it's also in our interest to benefit society, not just the individual. So we incentivize choices which are mandatory to the health and success of our society, such as creating the next generation to replace those aging out of the workforce.
Other cultures tackle it differently to. In Japan, organized stretching before work is commonplace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqPW6H3soKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biGPteoP2jg
However, it's very silly to compare procreation with fitness.
The fat procreator still benefits the society far more than the slim non...procreator, because on a 100 year or 200 year scale, both are dead, and the society only contains the progeny of one of them.
Put it this way: would you rather have a phone that can be upgraded a ton but will eventually wear out and stop working, or have a phone which can be endlessly replaced such that it is always modern and working, even if it isn't top of the line?
My current employer also has a policy allowing a certain amount of unpaid time out of the office for charity projects that you'd like to participate in.
So even 5 weeks does not allow us to actually go on a vacation.
When I hired on, I was told that using more than 3 days for sick leave would get you fired.
Second, from the perspective of the employer, why should he be punished and forced to pay for these things? He's paying you for your labor, that's the exchange that's been set up. He's not your patron and he hasn't pledged to care for you for the rest of your life. He gets no value when you are not working. What is he paying for, and on what basis should the government compel him to do that?
PTO is a perk, not a right. You are not entitled to your employer's money. That's not to say you shouldn't find an employer who will give that perk, but there's no reason the law should compel him to do so (other than the convenience of the employee).
And, heaven forbid you want to do something like take 2 of those 3 weeks within the span of a month.
Seriously, our obsession with work in the US is completely absurd and I cannot understand it.
No wonder people burn out.
Unemployment is our only real vacation, and those who go through extended periods of that know it feels like anything but.
Software developers might have it better, although not always. Here in the midwest I have yet to interview anywhere that offered more than 2 weeks of vacation for a new hire.
I think our sabbatical program isn't common, but the rest of the policy seems fairly standard for the area.
Edit: We also accrue sick time at some pace (maybe 5 per year that don't roll over; I honestly have no idea as I've never tracked nor taken a sick day (in the HR systems); of course, I've stayed home while sick when warranted) and have paid parental leave (6 weeks paid for primary and 2 weeks paid for secondary caregiver).
If taking all possible days, in the first year you have 42 days off, up to 55 by year 10
Then in High School it was Mid June to August.
Then in university mid May to August.
Then I graduated and started to work: 2 weeks, yay![1]
[1] This is true for full time employment. One way to escape it is to work freelance contracts. I did this for years, and regularly gave myself a few months off between contracts.
Joke aside, it baffles me every time this comes up wrt. american workers. I have 5 weeks PTO and I'm the worst off from all of my friends: most have between 7-8 weeks, some even up to 9-11 weeks per annum. [and they're not even teachers] Of course you're also expected to take every last day.
Though when I think of that, a friend of mine who works at the CEA mentioned something like 50 days off.
For US folks :this does not include sick days, these are completely independent (and not capped)
This happens a few days a year in north america, say at christmas or thanksgiving.
You can almost feel the whole country breathing a sigh of relief.
Health care expenses would go down a lot and I believe in many jobs productivity wouldn't suffer much either. I see so many people just going through the motions pretending to be busy.
If you're expected to be reachable then you aren't really on vacation. I simply tell them I'm going hiking in $NationalPark where phone service is not possible. If you let them know you are available then they will take advantage of it. If you let them know you are unavailable they'll plan for that.
That's how I got married = "I was told that if you take one of the trails from the lodge over to a high overlook your phone will report signal for at least one carrier from down in the valley, but they're not sure if anyone's ever actually managed to make a call."
Sequoia might not be that isolated these days, but it was still a great choice.
Maybe this is the plan to fight churn. The devil you know at least gives you a few more days off.