And here I am, reading this in country were 30 days of vacation plus bank holidays are the norm, 24 days the bare legal limit and anything below 28 days considered exploitation.
When I used to work in Russia, the standard was 28 days (or 4 weeks), but there were some requirements: you have to take first vacation as 2 weeks minimum, most companies expect you to submit your vacation before the year starts, and you can take vacations only in weeks. So 28 days is actually only 20 working days. As basically it counts weekends too.
In the US it was a disappointment to learn that I only had 15 working days as vacation, but after learning the system, you can always make it work way better, by combining bank holidays with vacations, you can be on vacation like 5-6 times a year, but shorter periods, which I liked way more.
As an example, you want to take of the week Christmas and New Year, the 25th and 26th are bank holidays as is Jan 1st. This year Dec. 26th was a Monday, so whole week required 4 vacation days. Some years bank holidays fabor employees, other years favor employers.
And regarding your plan: Depends on the employer but yes it works. I had a colleague who didn't plan to do any big vacation so he just took a day of every friday for months.
Similar in my country. The legal minimum by law is 24 days and based on a 6 day work week (Mon-Sat) thus for most workers it's 20 days.
Similar, everyone is Russia believe that they are paying only 7% income tax, which is also not true, because your employer pays close to 40% of the taxes for you, which you don’t know of.
Based on that, if “regular” Russian folk (without doing much research) looks online, they think that they live in one of the best countries:
- taxes lower than everywhere else, they think it is 7%, when it is close to 40-50% (one of the highest in the world). - vacations are only 20 working days, which is good on average.