What is going on in the US is nothing short of shameful.
Could be better for sure, but a graph showing the US as having 0 days of paid days off because the federal government doesn't mandate anything is misleading at best. Average US worker after 1 year of employment earns 7 sick days and 11 vacation days. And likely has some state and federal holidays off as well, and could very well qualify for state required PTO and sick time. But that doesn't get clicks and attention.
More data, if one is curious:
Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?
On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.
> "workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation"
It looks like in Germany it's 20 days a year - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sick-days-absentees-mental-hea...
Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Well, no. These are averages. Obviously, some people take more sick days than others; e.g. women with severe period pains might take days off each month.
> Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels?
Sick days are not just for "illness", so they aren't an indicator for overall health.
> Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
I could make a snarky response about US education or something, but instead, I just want to point out that I find it strange how people in bad situations often defend their circumstances, rather than trying to change them.
Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.
If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.
Life expectancy in the US is lower because we're all overweight. Infant mortality isn't a standardized metric, so it really shouldn't be used to compare health systems, even though people try to do so all of the time. A lot of infant mortality in the US is due to there being 1.5-2x as many births to mothers under the age of 20 (versus what one might see in Europe), which is really a societal problem, not a healthcare problem.
- If I don't get paid my full salary when I'm sick and I need the money, I'll go to work sick and infect others. I can't afford to not make it someone else's problem.
- If there's a strong culture of "people aren't really sick, they're just lazy" or an implicit "people that take too much time off are less likely to be promoted", I'll go in sick.
A lot of those sick days are also childcare.
In my country we get paid 80% of our usual pay on sick days prescribed by doctor.
We also can get an appointment online and get that sick day. We can also get sick days up to 3 days prior.
Also you can get a sick day if your kid is sick.
You can't just not show up for work and call in sick. Within the same day you have to call your doctor and explain the symptoms and they have to start the paperwork for the sick leave. Even if it is for a day.
For a cold or a cough you would not get sick leave, though.
In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped, so any missed day is a missed paid day. When social security comes into play they tend to pay the base pay of the position.
That would mean that if you miss a week because of an illness you might see a salary reduction close to a fifth of your monthly salary. That's something that most people don't have the luxury.
Apart of that most companies treat any medical leave after the third (yearly) as suspicious, which needs extra investigation.
So as we might not have a limit, and it's relatively paid, most people do meagre use of it.
I don't think that's true.
ugh, "sick days", what an absurd concept. If you are too unwell to work, you don't go to work , of course, and get paid while at home, until you're healed. Not 7 days, not 2 days, just the amount of days required. putting a number on that. ugh
and 11 vacation days. Wauw. After a decades of working in Europe you can get a good amount of holidays. in 2025 I had 49 day of which 20 are that minimum you start out with. Every overtime and outside business hour call also gets recovered, that's an extra 3 days so we've passed 50.
but what else is new, in the 80 and 90s workers in US were boasting about doing 80hrs of work each week... like wtf :). They live to work, I prefer to work to live life.
I read "could be better for sure" together with the whole "but" that came after it - meaning even though it could be better, it's not so bad because it averages 11.