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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

For people who aren’t familiar, Sweden takes summer holidays seriously. 25-30 days + public holidays is a normal amount of annual vacation time, and if an employee requests it and has the time available, it’s basically legally required to allow them to take a four-week contiguous summer break.

(See https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...)

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Not only that but the vacation is real. If someone is off then you should not expect them to answer at all (because if you do you’ll get very disappointed).

This might not be true for Sweden, but Denmark have an interesting rule that makes contacting people in their vacation fairly expensive. If I'm asked to change my plans, my employer needs to compensate me financially. If you get a call and need to work for 30 minutes, then you are entitled to a full replacement day, not just the 30 minutes. For some jobs, interrupting people on vacation simply isn't allowed.

I work for a UK company and most people take basically all of August off (I end up with two months of vacation days a year so I take August off and sprinkle some leave around the year) and I can confirm that taking a month off is great. You forget what it's like to work, really.

That’s great! It’s very much not the norm here in general tho, in my experience two weeks would be the max people would take off contiguously.

Wow literally never heard of people taking 4 weeks off in the UK. Is this a new thing to deal with child care in the summer holidays?

Is this at the executive level?

Ditto Australia: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/leave/annual-leave

  Full-time and part-time employees get 4 weeks of annual leave, based on their ordinary hours of work.

Yeah, but there's little culture of actually taking that time.

I guess our experiences vary - our family had month long adventure vacations most years since the 1970s, and growing up we did a half year tour about the whole country when dad got cumulative long service year.

Sweden is fairly unique in allowing the employee to take a 4 week break. Is Australia the same?

2 weeks is the acceptable limit in the UK for example (where also has 20-35 holiday is common) though if you can convince your boss otherwise, you can take longer, but most people can't

Likely varies by industry - a peer Australian (probably in private IT ?) stated it's uncommon to take a break, whereas I'd say in mining, oil, gas, civil service, police and a good number of structured contract employment its more common.

I've "retired" into agriculture and a lot of farmers take a month off after harvest time to go fishing or other wise relax (this generally means filling up a couple of deep chest freezers with fish for the rest of the year).

Some employers "force" their employees to use a portion of their annual leave during the Christmas / New Year shutdown period (usually 24 December -> first full week after New Years Day, if not longer). So you might not be able to use the full 4 weeks continuously.

This can be an unwelcome feature for some people, for example, if you want to have a vacation in the northern hemisphere summer season instead and/or maybe you don't have substantial family in Australia (or at least, those you actually want to see).

The auscorp reddit has a yearly thread on this issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/auscorp/comments/1mw6pqt/end_of_yea...

Those with school aged children might also want to save some of their annual for the mid-term/mid-year breaks as well. (Our academic years are aligned to calendar years)

In Germany your employer has to grant you two consecutive weeks of vacation by law, and vacation is very rarely denied, even for 3–4 weeks breaks.

This is normal in most countries apart from the contiguous break requirement.

I thought it's basically the same in all of EU?

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