Time Off Around the World

It's the day after Christmas: Are you reading this blog post from work or are you home for the holidays? How is your vacation time as compared to other workers from around the world?

Here's a graph from the Economist, based on the data compiled by consultancy group Mercer:

North Americans are more industrious than South Americans [...]. Asians work harder than Europeans. Among the feckless workers from the old continent, those in the troubled economies of Greece, Spain and Portugal have among the most generous holiday allowances.

What's the statutory minimum time off companies in the United States have to give its employees? None: the chart above showed a typical 15 days time off that most companies give its workers, but that's not required by law.

The Mercer Report - via The Dish


This is a pretty misleading infographic. It shows the United States as having 15 days of statutory leave then states in the fine print it actually has none.If it is supposed to show what employees are entitlted too,as it says it is then shouldn't the US should be shown as 0 or the title of the graph be "Usual employee holiday days"?
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This is also inaccurate for the UK. We get a full 28 days paid statutory leave by law.

20 days holiday plus 8 days public holiday. If you work a public holiday you still receive a paid day off to replace it.
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It's a misleading quote to use too, since it seems to imply that long mandatory holidays quotas lead to poor economies, when Brazil actually has a rapidly expanding economy, and Germany is as solid as you'll find in the world in the current global environment. Both of those countries are in the top 10 most vacation time. And Japan, while not having experienced strong growth in a while, is not collapsing either, and is also in the top 10.

I think my takeaway is that it's very possible to have a highly productive labor force, and still provide ample free time to enjoy life, which at this point in human history should be about something more than bare survival.
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It'd be interesting to see stats on the number of paid days off employees actually use. My last two employers have made it very difficult to make use of the vacation days that are part of our compensation package. They'd much prefer that we cash them in and work on those days. When someone does manage to take a week off, we've had managers insist that they work on the adjacent weekends since the vacation days only cover the weekdays in-between. All of this is legal for exempt employees (exempt means that an industry group lobbied Congress to get their workers exempt from labor laws).
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Wow, statistics and damned lies! This doesn't BEGIN to tell the story.

They've got to AT LEAST weight the average here by the Actual % of the population that's employed.

# Days of vaca. are meaningless if only 4 guys have jobs.

Also, other countries take holidays and office hours MUCH more seriously than we do.

1Ex:-Try getting anything in France on a holiday,

or going to a restaurant between the hours of 2:30 and 5:30,

even in the cities much less the country,

and you will be SOL.

-Now contrast that with our Convenience stores, or even NYC where something is always open.
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In France, if you work for a company that requires you to do overtime during the year, you receive compensation in vacation days. I knew a guy once who worked for a company that made software fro mobile phones and he had a full two months of vacation to take when summer came around.

AND no one was expected to do his job while he was away. The work just sat there and waited for him to get back.

LOL
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While its true, that Germans have a law that requires at least 20 days of holiday, actually almost all Germans have 30 days holiday entitlement. This is defined in contracts (called Tarifvertrag), negotiated between unions and the employer associations.
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