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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Instead of fixed-date holidays, just mandate 15-20 days of paid vacation. Why is this so politically untenable in the USA? Why would voters (besides the relatively few business owners) vote against this?

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The article basically says people like holidays more than vacation. Maybe its the family/friend aspect, or that everyone is off at the same time.

If I had a month off in the summer I could find some family and friends to visit :)

Plane ticket prices go up around public holidays. When taking a vocation one may choose dates when ticket prices are affordable.

> everyone is off at the same time

In Europe it is generally understood that nothing gets done in August. Not much gets done in July. Everyone’s at the nearby vacation spot.

As a kid in Slovenia, going to the seaside in Croatia was always fun. Slovenians would completely over-run the coast and you could barely find any locals. Meanwhile on our coast, everyone suddenly spoke German.

This European vacation is funded by American workers. If the Europeans had to spend in defense what the Americans give them, they would be forced to work more and give up theirs extended vacations and culture of “summers off”.

Before we wrap ourselves too tightly in the flag, let’s not forget the Vietnamese children spending their summer making those Speedos.

This might be overstating it a bit, but Europeans get salty when you note that their generous social safety net is subsidized in part by the fact that most NATO nations don't spend the mandated 2% of gdp on defense.

I often wonder what we could accomplish with even half of the ~ 700B / yr we spend on defense if we actually put it towards the public good. The US has two friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of blue water between us and peer adversaries which have no real ability to project power far from their shores. We could make do with less, but then of course the rest of the world would have to step up responsibility for their defense and not hide behind our coat tails

Let’s not forget that the Pax Americana is very beneficial to USA economically speaking. Yall ain’t doing this out of the goodness of your hearts.

The problem is those 'benefits' are largely going to the rich vs the average man, and voters are starting to wake up to that fact. You can expect the US to shift more isolationist in the future, even with, or maybe because of the troubles of the world

The US defense industry is a public-private wealth transfer mechanism (or "jobs program", if you don't wish to put so fine a point on it) to force taxpayers (and cash-holders, via inflation) to pay billions of dollars, every day, to the military-industrial complex (and implicitly to transfer value to its shareholders).

It has nothing to do with "making do", or protecting anyone. That's a side effect.

That's an exaggeration. The difference in military spending between the US and the EU is less than 2% of GDP. If all military spending was a complete waste of money, with no economic or social benefits at all, that would correspond to about 4 working days/year. But because military spending contributes to the economy in some ways, the actual cost to the American worker is probably closer to 2 days/year.

Is that what your boss told you when you negotiated vacations?

I learnt after my first year living in a Muslim majority country to never schedule anything important during Ramadan. Everything slows down, most offices let people go home early, and then there’s a week off for Eid.

> The article basically says people like holidays more than vacation. Maybe its the family/friend aspect, or that everyone is off at the same time.

At one point, in a moment of supreme rationality, the Soviet Union implemented "continuous production week," which eliminated common weekends in order to increase the utilization of factory equipment and to stamp out religion. Even they failed because of the irrational desire of people to have time off at the same time as their friends and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar

Why is it irrational to have time off at the same time as your friends and family?

I read the comment you're replying to as very sarcastic - I'm assuming they don't actually believe wanting time off together with friends and family is irrational.

The Soviet Union had 28 days of paid vacation, which workers were strongly incentivized to take.

Part of the reason the revolution happened in the first place was the normalization of the work week and time off work.

You can blame the Soviet Union for a lot of things, but preventing workers from taking vacation is certainly not one of them. Doing so betrays a large gap in history knowledge.

> You can blame the Soviet Union for a lot of things, but preventing workers from taking vacation is certainly not one of them. Doing so betrays a large gap in history knowledge.

Except I didn't do that. Maybe you should read my comment again. I was talking about weekends, not vacation, and said they staggered them, not eliminated them completely.

I can’t read the rest of the article without upgrading, but federal holidays are basically suggestions anyway for most jobs. People who got Juneteenth off might be in a bubble that didn’t see all the people and industries that ignored it.

This. This is it.

If 4th of july is off for everyone I know, you know I'm hosting a BBQ and having a grand time.

If I take a day off and have to coordinate 5 friends trying to take a day off at the same time with some having and some not success... That's different.

Also holidays are better for businesses than pto. Holidays are planned for in advance.

The main issue is that minimum wage workers especially restaurant and retail workers often don't get to partake.

They would have to be required, like take them or we will lock you out of the building/cut off network access at the end of the year. People are too worried about losing their jobs. That is why the whole unlimited vacation time scam is so popular. Now whether you take a vacation is completely on the employee's neck. Companies love this.

> That is why the whole unlimited vacation time scam is so popular.

It's a legitimately better choice for some of us. I take more vacation time when I don't have to ration it out like something scarce and precious.

The other reason that unlimited vacation time is popular (with firms) is that accrued vacation is a liability that is carried on the books and, in some jurisdictions, is a form of earned compensation which must be paid out at separation, whereas purely-employer-discretionary vacation (which is what “unlimited” vacation really is) is neither.

As article notes, people tend to not take time off unless it’s enforced in US. Early in my career I used to joke that my accumulated vacation time was my severance buffer to at will employment. It’s sad to think that it was both true and super misguided.

US sorely needs federal minimums for time off, parental paid leave (that doesn’t exempt people from small employers, who currently get next to nothing), sick leave and minimum compensation/notice period if they are to be let go (unless some egregious cause). Many employers already offer these and if we spread it out with small incremental taxes, it wouldn’t disproportionately hurt small employers either. This will give employees basic stability and reduce anxiety, most likely boosting productivity. Having nothing to fall back on definitely limited me at the start of my career.

I think this is because all Americans implicitly know that the "paid" vacation will come out of their salaries. 20 days of paid vacation (double what the average American worker gets) would cost around $2,500 at the average hourly wage. We have decided to structure our economy such that most Americans need that money to survive, which makes added vacation untenable.

I don't see how this is any different than public holidays.

It's not, but you hit the interesting point that we're already at a number of public holidays where employers don't automatically grant all the federal holidays. (I have seen employers make holidays "floaters" and let people choose which floaters they want to take off. Implicit is that they can't take all the floaters without using vacation days.)

So adding another 10-20 would likely not change actual PTO all that much.

US holidays don't apply to private workers. Lots of companies do offer paid days off on those days, but it would be a new thing to make them required paid days off.

And some companies go beyond and -expect- you to take a minimum number of paid days off, even sometimes in excess of giving you all the jurisdictional holidays off.

I used to think that the module in high school where we learned about “How The Other Half Lives” was provided as historical context. As an adult I’ve learned that the US continues to be a case study in two halves. A shame, as it needn’t be the way it is.

Edit: typo

Because most American holidays signify something important beyond a day off. Symbols matter to people.

Also, having coordinated time off makes it easier for people to actually reliably take that time off in practice. Which is important for holidays like Thanksgiving which involves travel and groups of people getting together.

And some people not in the US forget sometimes how BIG the US is. Additionally, a lot of our holidays have tradition and ritual associated with them. My favorite day of the year is a family event the 3rd Saturday of December (just pre xmas).

Part of the reason American salaries are so high is because they work so often. Forcing employers to give up an additional 20 days per year is a surefire way to tank the GDP.

Sounds like a good deal!

Meh. You can have both. Plenty of countries do have both, may it be Denmark or Switzerland.

People later in their careers at private employers tend to have both the highest salaries and the most vacation days.

Mandatory holidays are a no-go in the US.

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