Why the US is one of only a few countries with no paid time off
vox.com
vox.com
> Lonnie Golden, a labor economist at Penn State, said in survey after survey, American workers tend to say that making more money is a higher priority than having access to more paid time off
This is close to answering the question, however, it does not address why there is no national PTO law. It explains why workers do not take time off.
> Beyond that, Golden said, there’s always been an American discomfort with leisure and time off, and a cultural bias to display our commitment to work as a sign of status.
This is closer. As with the first example, this is just explaining why individuals choose not to take time off.
The answer is the USA is reluctant to put mandates on employers that would interfere with free association of entities due to our founding being largely influenced by the idea that individuals should be free to make contracts between others. The federal government is also limited in the constitution to only regulating interstate commerce. There are of course many examples where the federal government has ignored this thanks mostly to Wickard v. Filburn (1948).
Mandating PTO wouldn't be forcing people to make contracts; it would only say that IF you make a particular kind of contract, you need to include the following terms.
You can speculate and theorize about the reasons why, but the US is almost uniquely hostile to worker protections and benefits among developed countries.
I've always enjoyed being a contractor because I have unlimited vacation (within reason) and can balance how much time I want to take off with how much money I want to make.
That’s not in an of itself a bad thing. Other kinds of contracts that are banned include, but are not limited to:
- Contracts for the sale or distribution of controlled substances, such as drugs or drug paraphernalia;
- Agreements made for illegal activities, such as prostitution or gambling; and.
- Employment contracts that permit hiring underage workers.
> - Contracts for the sale or distribution of controlled substances, such as drugs or drug paraphernalia; + Gambling
Consent is a gray area due to the addictive nature of the what the buyer is buying.
> Prostitution
We do ban this, mostly due to I think society finding it icky.
>- Employment contracts that permit hiring underage workers.
Not between consenting adults.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/17/1194467863/europe-vacation-ho...
American PTO is insanely diverse in my experience, it varies wildly from one company to the next. You have to ask about it when you join a new company. What I think isn’t obvious, because it is not legislated, is that the variance is really high. Some companies have policies that are extremely generous even by European standards and some are extremely stingy. And then you have random things like summer hours (4 day weeks from May to September), shutting down for a couple weeks around Christmas (fully paid and separate from PTO), etc. It’s all over the map.
I think we all agree that paid leave is not considered a fundamental right by the majority of Americans, but why not? I feel confident in saying that if paid leave were considered fundamental, the US would make it mandatory. Aversion to legal mandates is not the barrier here.
He gets his conclusion from US workers (who he refers to as American workers) while in stead he should be wondering why all of the (I'm sure equally greedy) Western countries have these "absurd" vacations.
In NL you have to request the vacation way in advance. (Officially it's 2 weeks but then they might turn it down. 6 months in advance is a good idea) The looking forwards to it gradually grows until they have to bring it up every day in ever greater detail. It reminds to request your own, make plans and start their own count down.
Secretly it's all about productivity. Like they give you a weekend to recharge for the Monday. Like they let you go home for the night to sleep. Like they give you a lunch break to eat.
You can't have an union that span over multiple industries, thus unions will only fight for a single group on workers, sometimes against other workers. It makes it impossible to advocate for global labor rights. PTO is an old example, but for a more recent one, if an employer forced me to be available outside of my 40 weekly hours without comp, that would be illegal. I don't have to negociate for it. It's automatic. If your employer control your time, he has to pay you.
How are 4/5 (80%) small businesses operating with such low margins in one of the largest and prosperous cities that they would have to lay off people just to give them 10 days pto? Every other country major country has businesses offering more pto (see Europe for eg) and they seem to make it work is less prosperous economies
A lot of people take issue when someone points out lying as a likely explanation, because they think that assumes malice, but here's the thing: it's not about malice, it's about self-interest. Some folks will lie to benefit themselves. As you say, it's very simple.
But with surveys like this, I also have a hard time believing the responses if they're not backed up with hard data. So unless business owners want to open up their books for all to inspect, I take statements like 'fear they'd have to lay off workers' with multiple cups of salt.
I still have little sympathy though -- if your business cannot survive without exploiting people, it shouldn't survive, no matter what the cause of your business needing to exploit people.
I think realistically, though, if you asked any business in any country "Would increasing the cost of employees make you more likely to have trouble paying employees" every business would answer yes in a survey.
While the EU's unemployment rate is 5.9%, the unemployment rate of the countries who use the euro currency is 6.4% https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/08/01/eu-eurozone-un....
Edit: did you change your argument after I replied? I swear you were taking about total numbers before.
1.412B (China population) x 2% = 28.2m people in China unemployed
1.2m people in Greece unemployed
Yes, % is statistics. The absolute number of people is the real impact.
>1.2m people in Greece unemployed
>Yes, % is statistics. The absolute number of people is the real impact.
If that's the case why isn't America copying Greece's economic policy as Greece is leaving only 1.2m unemployed?
Labor participation rates are more comparable. The US rate is worse than the EU rate.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...
If you run a store in NYC that needs three workers at all time to operate, there's no getting around the fact that giving every employee time off will result in less productivity per year per employee. If you run a construction or transportation business - you need a certain number of people (maybe even legally) to operate at any time.
For the tech world and other white collar jobs for which it is true that time off may help the headline above isnt as applicable. While probably still behind european counterparts, many of these jobs in the US already have real vacation time and generous remote work options.
Some of this is probably closely connected to the reality that much of the US has nicer weather for much wider periods of time due to its lower average latitude.
That is very much country dependent and can't be stated as a general rule. While this may be the case in France, where some businesses close for the entire August that's certainly not the case in, for example, Switzerland where a business may close 2 weeks in February.
Most businesses don't close at all and within certain limits employees are free to take their vacation whenever it suits them.
because that prosperity does not follow a Gaussian distribution. The United States has a uniquely skewed distribution of national income; and Thomas Pikkety’s analysis of that data shows that the skew is growing progressively larger.
Realistically though, PTO comes out of salary, just like healthcare. For the businessman, it's a matter of total costs vs labor they get. Whether it's needing to hire someone to cover for 280 days of pto of everyone else, or paying more.
What raises wages and benefits is that the employer has to pay more to have enough people that want the job and are qualified. Total wage expenses go up only when there's no other choice.
The US seems to be one of very few countries where this is the case. It doesn't seem to be a very good model overall.
To be more precise: In some countries healthcare may be deducted from a salary. But that's usually an universal healthcare model, which is certainly not comparable.
You seem misinformed.
Social security, healthcare, various insurances... In other countries, everyone pays for those and the government provides them. Here, the cost is foisted disproportionately on employers and their employees (with those between jobs excluded from those services).
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Employers and employees still pay when the money is run thru a government payor instead of a non-government heath plan. There is no magic money that appears by changing who cuts the checks to providers.
Hypothetically, competing insurance companies would push prices down. In practice, the market isn't a fair market (even before you get into issues like "People need medicine to live, so a market is a bad tool to parcel out medicine because price the patient is willing to pay is unbounded"), so insurance companies tend to add cost through paperwork, managerial overhead, accounting overhead, and cases becoming more expensive to treat as delays in preventative and early-intervention care cause issues to become chronic and urgent-care issues.
When the payer is the government, the government can say "The price of insulin is 2% above cost of materials" ... and it is. And when the money is flowing from taxes to government to healthcare, instead of employees to employers to insurance to healthcare, a company isn't asking itself "Can we afford to take on more employees right now if it's going to cause our healthcare insurance costs and employment taxes to go up," because the decision of how many people to employ is decoupled from the question of how much in taxes the company will pay.
That doesn’t change the fact that the costs of healthcare will still be “foisted disproportionately on employers and their employees” because those are the revenue generating population.
Government is already the largest payor in healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid [0] (funded by taxes “disproportionately on employers and their employees”). You’d think that they would already have the market power to do whatever they’d like with prices.
0. https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
The private business share of health spending accounted for 17 percent of total health care spending,
For additional clarity, I probably need to find the data source for what CMS describes on that link.
I suspect that each of these owners is likely speaking in good faith, and at their current margins they probably would have to lay-off other people. But what I think they are failing to account for is that this will effect their competitors as well, so they may be able to compete across the board after a price increase.
It's probably a naive thought
Only if there is proper regulation, which there is less and less of. Otherwise you end up with price fixing and oligopoly.
Assuming you mean a business that is monopoly for say a decade and not a few years.
As a self-employed developer, I've had the same discussion with people that hire me and want to change my rate, "My rate is set by the market and I'm not willing to undercut the people behind me. If I were to set my rate, it would be greater and not less. Hire someone that takes less and best of luck to you, I might not be the right fit."
I'm all for growing the pie instead of changing the slices but that's a concern of things many orders of magnitude beyond myself. I thought rising interest rates might be good for the industry but it turns out the industry is pretty clueless and they don't actually seem to know what they're keeping and what they've dropped, accordingly some people that seem like dead weight technologically are basically untouchable to the people that make the budgets and decisions.
Things have been divorced from economic realism for so long, I'm not sure we can even reach the bottom before we run out of breath.
They aren't being "exploited." If they need so desperately to exploit workers, they can and should just go out of business instead. It's that simple. It's called a market and this is how it works. Business owners love to describe themselves as risk-takers but they whine like babies when they have to pay the price. They are dishonest and generally pathetic people in my experience.
In NYC, the enemy is the landlord.
The coffee shop near where I work is a small business and their landlord increases the rent regardless of market conditions. At some point they either close up, putting 2-3 people out of work, or end up charging $10 per cup of coffee.
Right now there is no market counter force against the rent increases. There are many empty units but the landlords keep the rent high to keep the value of the building high. There is no penalty for keeping the unit empty even if there is demand for the unit at a lower price point.
For small time shitty owners, they run off the books and write down “losses” while letting property crumble. In the legit economy, it’s like a variant of the Great Eskimo Tax Scam.
It’s going to get crazier too - hundreds billions of dollars of real estate is underwater in NYC alone, and banks hold 60-70% of the paper.
They interview MIT professor Tom Kochan who says that in the 1930s U.S unions like the AFL actually pushed against federally guaranteed worker benefits like paid vacation because then there'd be less need for unions. Other benefits Americans never got were federally guaranteed health insurance and pensions.
To quote the podcast transcript [1]
"The big three - pensions, health insurance, time off through vacations - were left off the table. Instead, we got collective bargaining rights, which basically say we can bargain and negotiate with our individual employers for pension, health care and vacation. Now, we should say that the U.S. is also known for not passing these work benefits because of racism. A bunch of people in the U.S. back then didn't want Black people, for example, to get these benefits, so no one got them.
But in Europe, everyone gets the big three - vacation, pension, health care - as a right. Vacation started spreading in Europe in the 1920s and '30s, and health care came in waves in the 1940s, '70s and '80s. And maybe this is why European countries started cutting their hours after 1979, but not the U.S. Like, maybe Europeans were, like, OK, we're getting all these benefits, plus we're just generally getting richer. Maybe work is not so important anymore. But when you do have to pay for these things, like we do in the U.S. - maybe that's why work is so important here."
On the other hand, Europe's median annual salary is €33.5k compared to $59.5k, while the average home sale price per square foot in the US is significantly lower than Europe [0] [1].
So I don't know what to think about this. Given that I've only worked at places with generous time-off policies, I don't think I can have a say on the matter.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/722905/average-residenti...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/study-reveals-average-cost-pe...
Okay, let's check the source on that...
https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/no-vacation-nation-2...
...and it's not in the pdf as far as I can tell. They just assert it without citation.
In sources they do list the BLS:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/percent-access-...
Though assuming I'm reading that chart correctly that only says that 21% of Americans have no formal vacation days. Which I guess they could be rounding up to 1 in 4 while ignoring other types of paid time off like holidays, sick days, companies with "unlimited" PTO, etc.
The BLS numbers seem to indicate the actual figure is closer to 13% of Americans who have no paid time off all.
Where do you live that doesn't have fast food, restaurants, retail, and so on? Most of these 'skilless' jobs are minumum wage. You are advocating for entire sectors of people to be paid less (i.e. exploited further) based on the false notion that few people are paid minimum.
2. Even if it was paid by the government, there are reasons to rationalize welfare. You help everyone, because needing help isn't a moral failure, and we're a rich society so we can. Its like insurance... you might not think you'll get into a car accident (everyone thinks they're a good driver), but you still pay into insurance because when a bad day comes, you might not be able to afford it.
3. Income isn't closely tied to how hard people work, nor skill. We like to pretend it is, but it's not. Spreading a small amount of your income around to help others who aren't rewarded financial for their hard work, despite being a boost for society, helps everyone.
Also: Who thinks paid time off is bad? Why is this an opinion?
Your life is more than your work, and everyone should have a certain amount of guaranteed time for themselves and their families. It's an absolute baseline that puts a limit on how bad the rat race can get.
Having seen both systems first-hand, the European attitude leads to a much better work-life balance on a societal level.
We collectively have decided that certain behaviors should be incentivised for general well being and basic quality of life for the population. If it's beneficial in the long run if the entire population isn't worked to burn out, and overall productivity is affected, I think a minimum PTO isn't that far fetched an idea.
That's not different than other fringe benefits.
Without it, your salary would probably be a bit higher.
Noone else's money is involved.
- Sometimes the company just closes for two weeks the summer (Betriebsferien). You see this for restaurants, bakeries, and so on. They post a sign at the door with the dates and when they open again.
- If the company can't close, colleagues aren't allowed to take paid time off at the same time. Colleagues tell each other what they do such that substitution is possible.
- Sometimes the company partially closes and has only a minimal service running.
- It is accepted that during the holiday seasons everything runs a lot slower.
- Sometimes it just does not matter, especially for large companies or for very fluid working situations like health care. There will be always some people picking up what needs to be done.
- Sometimes the employee takes the work into holidays but this is somewhat frowned upon because the expectation is that you really take time off.
And when the company reopens or the colleagues return from their holidays they bring a lot of fresh energy. And because all companies do this there is no loss of competitive activity. Companies tend to focus how to manage paid time off well instead of blocking it.
The important part of PTO in EU is that’s guaranteed that you can take it, or even that you MUST take it. If the total amount of money per year is the same, it doesn’t make a lot of difference whether it’s paid or unpaid.
Paid time off makes as much sense as making energy from not doing work instead of spending energy to do work.
A recent article in the NYT pointed out how the minimum wage is irrelevant now given the difficulty of hiring: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/business/economy/minimum-...
This is the argument the anti-minimum wagers have been saying forever. The going rate for workers will rise well above the minimum wage, and by having a high minimum wage you prevent people from getting on the economic ladder at all.
The lack of mandated paid time off means it is a benefit companies can provide. This attracts workers. I want most benefits to be negotiated this way, as well as the minimum wage eliminated.
Idiom for anyone uncertain what I'm referring to: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/that%27ll_be_the_day
Still "no time off" is not synonymous with "negotiated time off". I'm arguing with the title being wrong/misleading. Not whether USA should have mandated time off.
Now in my 40s, hell yes. I'd take a higher pay cut for even more weeks.
That added up to 9 weeks a year and turned out to be some of the happiest time of my life.
It's not "up to the discretion of private employers". It is up to the contractual arrangement between an employee and his employer.
The USA is a huge place. It isn't obvious to me that there should be national laws for things like this. This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to be set on a state-by-state basis.
There was no mention of "moral rationale" in the original discussion.
The USA is still pretty tiny compared to basically the rest of the world.
The US constitution doesn't give the federal government authority to do this, and rightly so.
For example median income in the US is higher than Luxembourg and Norway.
As for median income, I think you're looking at income net of taxes, because I'm fairly certain that median gross income is higher in Luxembourg and Norway (and in Switzerland) than in the US. If you're looking at net income, you also have to factor in what those taxes do to improve quality of life (a huge amount, if we're talking about the three countries I mention above).
Use your fucking brain before you comment again
Just because the mandated minimum PTO is 0 doesn't mean everyone has 0 days PTO. Minimum wage is another example - the federal minimum wage is really low but the median income in America is higher than in Europe.
We just don't have the same approach to government regulations.