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Comment by fedd | Hacker News Reader

i heard that some people say that in europe there are too many holidays, especially in those countries that are not very rich. those people say, that these vacations, holidays and other evidences of socialism (or even laziness) are the cause of their problems.

i dont know, just wanted to hear thoughts...

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I currently live in Vienna, Austria. Besides lots of public holidays you get 25 vacation days per year and unlimited sick days independent from the vacation days. If you don't take your vacation days your employer must pay you for them, so most (all) employers require their employees to take their vacation days. As your vacation days don't expire, you can also "add them up" and take a longer vacation in one of the following years. You typically work 38.5 hours per week, and while for some areas (paid) overtime is common, it is definitely not the norm for the generic employee.

As for the "not very rich" part: According to Mercer's annual study Vienna is worldwide the most livable city - see: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2010/gb2010... - but yes - I guess that the quality-of-life would be much better without those vacation days.

(Saying all that, I still plan to move to SF in the following months...)

I have been living and working in France for almost three years now. I enjoy an effective 45 days of vacation a year, since the 35 hour work week is translated to vacation. The pay is not very good compared to the rest of the world, but it is a very good deal. My time is more valuable to me than the things I can buy. It is easy to make fun of the lazy French, but at times they seem to have a better grasp of what is important in life.

I have 10 days of holiday here in Canada. At my previous job in the UK I had 21 (excluding bank holidays). A few months after I moved here the enormity of the situation hit me and I nearly cried. Sure, the average salary is much higher, but I've realised that a day off is worth much more to me than my daily wage.

People are no more productive here than there; work tends to take up the time you give it. Burnout rates seem to be much higher in North America, people are more tired and less traveled.

Because companies here have more control over when an employee can take a holiday, team members take holidays in groups "when it's good for the team", meaning that there are a couple of weeks when absolutely nothing can get done even for those who aren't on vacation.

Another closely-related issue is sick leave. In the UK the occasional sick day isn't usually subtracted from your holiday allowance. Here no-one wants to be off sick because they lose a valuable day off, so they come in to work and spread viruses around to everyone else.

Having said that, I don't think the 3-day week would help. I feel that to improve productivity, one needs a period of time to completely wind down and three days isn't enough for that. I think more week-long vacations would be a better solution.

In the UK the occasional sick day isn't usually subtracted from your holiday allowance

In Canada (& I assume USA), your sick leave is take out of your holidays?! Madness!

capitalism! )

The states with some of the longest holidays (e.g. France (30 days per year), Germany (24 days per year)) are the economically strongest states in the EU. It's France and Germany that can afford to bail out the countries with less working time, e.g. Ireland (20 days), Greece (20 days), Portugal (22 days).

(for the record 20 days is the legal minimum under the European Working Time Directive)

In contrast, the US federal government observes 10 holidays, and most businesses probably only close for 5 - 7 of those.

http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2011.as...

When you're an American in Europe for an extended period of time, you feel like everything is always closed (short business hours plus so many holidays). I hear that business hours have been expanding, though.

Note that the numbers stated by rmc2 are not the number of public holidays, but the number of vacation days you, as an employee, has a year. Typically this is on top of public holidays. Of course, most European countries, IIRC, do not shift holidays that fall on weekends to the preceding or following work days.

Yes there are on average about 8 public holiday 'everyone gets a day off work' days per year on top of those annual leave entitlement (which you can usually take at any time of the year for your own holidays).

And AFAIK European countries do shift days to the next weekend, in fact in some countries (Ireland) that's the legal requirement.

Too many holidays means you always have someone in the team who is in holidays and that's not good for projects.

For a lot of jobs though, it doesn't matter.

Holidays tend to clump up in the summer, so there are a few weeks there are almost no activity, and full activity the rest of the year.

When you have six weeks of holidays, the summer isn't enough...

Causes of the current problems are bad fiscal policy and believing that economic growth is forever sustainable. If there are too many holidays in those countries, then how is the U.S. economy in the place it is now (with the least vacation days in the world)?

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