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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

> are you nuts?

There's a new law still in committee:

https://www.scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=4226...

> What? Why is it called vacation then

Having more than two weeks off in a year is pretty strange. I worked at a place with "unlimited vacation" once, and you weren't allowed to take off more than two weeks at a time until someone took off two weeks every three weeks ... and that ended that policy. They made it about 4 months before getting fired though.

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In most EU countries it is mandatory minimum to give 4 paid weeks off per year, otherwise the company is breaking the law. And maternity leave obviously is almost a year, paid, not 2 weeks unpaid. I find it hard to justify living in a place that cares so little about its people. I get its your home country, but I mean, if your home country is actively hostile towards you, why stay?

> In most EU countries it is mandatory minimum to give 4 paid weeks off per year, otherwise the company is breaking the law.

Make that five weeks for France plus up to 11 days of public holidays. That's a minimum too, we have a whole bunch of additional stuff that can stack on top of that, so many I can't even make a complete list from memory.

One of the many reasons my current s&p500 company will no longer actively hire in France other than to support specific big sales

As per the saying: "The French copy no one and nobody copies the French". If we were carbon copies of the British or the Americans, life on Earth would be just a little bit more boring.

We're not better or worse, we're just different. Deal with it or leave us be.

Sounds like the solution is pushing for the same type of legal minimums everywhere else, then ;)

Language, culture, family, friends, and missing awareness that conditions elsewhere might be actually better, to name a few?

Also, not everyone has the resources to move to another country.

You don't need much. Just a job willing to sponsor you, or be willing to start a business on an entrepreneurship visa.

And enough money to relocate across an ocean, if you can find a job willing to sponsor you, which is not at all assured. And starting a business requires initial capital.

If a job is willing to sponsor you, they are usually willing to pay the relocation expenses up front. Just like in the US if they want you to relocate across the country.

People have migrated throughout thousands of years on much less than most people have today.

It should be straight up illegal to use the word unlimited in any sort of advertising, marketing materials, job offers etc... if it's not actually unlimited.

Unlimited paid vacation is simply not a thing that is offered by any company anywhere in the world.

> Having more than two weeks off in a year is pretty strange.

I mean, not that strange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

2 weeks "in the US" -- too late to edit the comment.

Yeah, I took July off this year and last year. Obviously that needs some up-front notice to ensure there's cover, but I tell my manager in the spring and it's fine.

Americans are very, very strange and the fact they think they're normal is part of that.

There are plenty of US companies that have 4 week vacation policies. There are also plenty with "flexible" time off where in theory you can take more (but tends to converge on some common number).

Probably other US organizations (universities?) also have fairly good vacation policies.

I think what's different about the US is that the country and states tend to not mandate this stuff. This does lead to people getting exploited under certain situations where the employer has more power in the relationship. I think the US is wrong on this but seems to work for them?

Americans are not “strange”, whatever that means. The US has overall worse protections than the EU, that’s it. It sucks, we all know that. There’s no need to appeal to some weirdness argument.

I guess people in Europe find it strange that people in the US are willing to accept the status quo there?

Presumably, you think we should what? Take the to the streets? Standard of living of food security is still far too high generally for this to seem reasonable for most.

Shall we lobby our representatives? This does happen at the state level, and accordingly many states have more pro-worker policies and laws. But change at the federal level is a substantially harder thing to bring.

Exactly. It's not a matter of accepting or not accepting. There's practically nothing that can be done about it.

At the federal level, no major presidential candidate supports EU-style worker protections and mandatory benefits. And not enough congressional candidates support it, not even remotely enough to change anything. In fact, the vast majority are outright hostile to worker rights due to lobbying/capture by corporate interests.

At the state level, there is lots of variance, but even in the states most friendly to workers, it's not remotely possible to reach Europe's level of benefits around vacation, sick leave, maternity leave, let alone the right to organize for these things. There is no political will, and any political candidate who actually has the will could never win a statewide election.

The way this worked in many places is that workers formed political parties. In France people did and still take to the streets over labour issues. You can also unionize. Or sure, lobby. But if people are happy with the current system then that's also fine.

All in all the US has been a success story. Whether there's correlation or causation between that and some of the regulatory and legal environment is hard to say. Maybe its success is primarily due to resources and geography and maybe the US would be even more successful with a more European style system.

[EDIT: it's should have been its ;) ]

The fact that this is not happening at a grassroots level in the US would suggest that it's not as big a deal to Americans as the Europeans in this thread think it should be.

Speaking only for myself, I've found that when I joined a company whose time-off policies I didn't like (only one so far), I just asked for more time off as part of the deal. The response I got was "sure. It's easier for us to give you more paid time off than more money."

On the other hand, when I joined a previous employer that (at the time--they improved) had fairly mediocre paid time off policies (not really that bad but it was the first time I had encountered PTO including both vacation and sick time and there was mandatory shutdown around the holidays). When I got what seemed like a pretty generous offer given I was making a relatively small salary at the time and the company was private so no stock, they also made it clear that the PTO was non-negotiable. Now, in practice, given my role no one was eyeing a few hours here and there to go to some appointment or a bit of personal time tacked on to business travel especially if I had traveled over a weekend, but the paper amount of PTO was just so-so.

> The way this worked in many places is that workers formed political parties.

Given the current political system(s) in the US, this is practically impossible at the federal level; difficult at the state level; somewhat more possible at the city level (eg New York City's Working Families Party). Third parties exist but generally have almost no influence.

> Presumably, you think we should what? Take the to the streets?

Ummmmmm, Yes?

It's how the people who got ALL the rights we take for grated today did.

Especially our employment rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs

My point was that the situation hasn't reached anywhere near a boiling point for "taking to the streets" to seem wise to the amount of people it would require to bring real change.

I worked at a place where there was a gradually-increasing amount per year you could earn, implemented as a fraction of a day per paycheck. I was earning 5 wks a year when I left. I went on a two-week cruise, and with the usual travel buffers it took three weeks. So now mention of two-week vacations makes me a little nervous.

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