Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

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How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay? that is a significant cost to many small businesses. Do you limit it based on how many employees they have? How many hours the employee averages per week? The last time Congress set limits they threw low wage earners under the bus; the now infamous ACA twenty nine hour rule.

minimum wage should not be at the federal level, it is a state by state and city by city issue that should be based upon cost of living in that area. federal laws should protect from working without pay and discrimination. if localities wanted to protect low wage earners they woulds step back occupational license requirements for many positions and reduce the burden of fees and regulatory compliance as well; that twenty to twenty five dollar fee some states charge just for a license may not be bad for you or me but for the low wage earner it is very bad. having to pay five hundred dollars for a license to work is no better, but these costs exist and are not income scaled

> How do you decide who qualifies for four weeks pay?

You don't. Every full-time employee have right to paid holidays, like we have in every other country in the world.

That leads to less full-time employees. People will get their hours cut.

Maybe we need to consider someone who works more than 15 hours a week full time. Or perhaps the benefits scale for employees based on number of hours worked.

It works in every other country...

I wasn't clear. In Europe, part-time employees get their time off pro-rated based on working hours, while full-time ones get minimum required by law (20+ days per year, depending on country). Plus additional ~10 paid public holidays for everyone.

The US is pretty much the only developed country without mandatory vacation time. This is a solved problem. Just look around how other countries do it.

If it's such a bright idea, why can't NY and CA do it? They're literally the size and population of many other countries. In the US, the states are free to do whatever they want with wage and employment laws, so long as it doesn't violate the constitution. If CA wants to set the minimum wage to $30/hr + 2 weeks mandatory PTO, they are 100% free to do it. It's pretty much a single party state at this point.

Other countries are able to support higher labor rates because they have protectionist tariffs, such as the VAT. But if the US wants to raise tariffs, all of a sudden we're racist idiots.

Anyway, a lot of what's perceived to be wrong with the US can easily be solved at the state level, but turns out nobody actually wants to foot the bill for these things.

I was proposing basically removing most of not all of the sates jurisdiction over labour laws the USA doesn't need 52 different sets of labour laws.

Well, it turns out, people aren't robots. They need rest. They need time off.

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