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Comment by baud147258 | Hacker News Reader

> "not everyone can afford to take a week off work"

Being in a country where vacation time is paid by the company (currently 7 weeks / year, even if I usually don't use up all of it), the idea that taking a day off work means less money at the end of the month is mind boggling.

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I'm talking about taking a week _off_ off.

For example leaving one job and having a gap before another one, or getting sacked and having a few weeks without work, or moving town before you have something lined up, etc.

Basically, being able to function without income for a nonzero period.

I wouldn't want to use my holiday weeks looking for work more than a few times in my life even if I have quite a generous allowance (well, generous by 'normal people' standards, I find the idea of working >80% of the year quite odd)

Being in a country where I can negotiate with my employer as to vacation time in respect to my salary, the idea that someone has to have accept minimum of 7 weeks regardless of circumstances is mind boggling.

It's because, absent that protection, workers on the weaker end tend to get squeezed down to very low PTO whether they want that or not.

[EDIT] weaker end in terms of ability to negotiate—so, the vast majority of workers.

Unfortunately what often happens is that this law applies only to full time workers at some cutoff (e.g. 30+ hours a week). If the cost of full time is too high (e.g. 7 weeks paid vacation for a low skilled job), the employer would be more likely to hire more part time workers. And you would see people working multiple part time jobs rather that a full time job. Some of those workers would likely be willing to forgo a generous benefit like 7 week vacation for the opportunity to work one job.

There must be a lot more people who think the law's helping them than harming them, or it'd be changed. Might take time, but those sorts of laws have been common all over Europe for quite a while and I don't see any especially strong movements to repeal them, or even reduce the days off per year, despite incentives for businesses to attempt to drum up or encourage (at least, surely, not to oppose) such a movement, if possible, which one would expect to make such movements significantly easier to start and grow, if they had much popular support at all.

I agree that it's not a popular opinion, but with these sorts of things the unintended consequences are not very visible. The people working part time may not realize it may be due to this affect.

It's also interesting to look at percentage of workers that work part time by country. US is relatively low at 22% while countries with a more generous welfare state are higher (France 39%, Norway 48%)

But there are a million other things going on as well so I'm not sure if it's related to that or something else

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.PART.ZS?most_rec...

Well, the legal minimum is 5 weeks (congés payés), but I got also 2 more weeks, called RTT because the maximum number of weekly worked hours is 35h and it's expected that I work more than the 35h maximum per week, so the additional days off are to compensate for this (and since we're not paid by the hour, we can't just get overtime).

What has this offered to your country? Why doesn't it have it's Amazon or SpaceX? Why is the Linux Foundation here? Why are the salaries in the most unregulated or frontier markets the best in the US and not in Europe?

Mandating a week off for everyone doesn't seem to give the space needed for poorer people to become as wealthy as they might deserve. What can be done?

Agglomeration dynamics, a great higher education system, 300M+ people who share the same language, and a common market go a long way. Cheap finance and government support (defense spending) also help.

If you want to attribute America's economic advantage to hours worked or labor regulations (and yes, they do matter to an extent), you have to be ready to explain why Russia, Mexico, Greece, and Chile aren't also economic powerhouses.

Source: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

It's not obvious what can be done. Efforts to distribute the wealth (post WW2 style) will most likely lead to capital flight, and you guys have a gargantuan mass media machine devoted to making sure this kind of thing does not happen to begin with. America is experiencing advanced regulatory capture and the solutions were needed decades ago.

My personal conjecture is that you're in for a long period of degradation followed by something violent. Fascism most likely.

Sad, but likely true. It would appear as an observer that facist ideals are on the rise even in the youngest genrrations, but that may be simply me noticing it more.

Yes, unfortunately. It doesn't help that Americans are culturally unable to process the idea that we are not "the best" even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Those are ridiculous claims. Do you have any evidence do back up your claims that having no minimum number of legal days off is related in any way to prosperity? Proof from almost every other OECD country says no.

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