This whole country is a human rights violation.

According to this CBS article https://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-in-four-workers-in-us-dont-get-any-paid-vacation-time-or-holidays/

1 in 4 workers don't get any paid vacation time. It's from 2019 but it's not like things have gotten better over there since then.

That's my Americans never leave the US. They don't have time. ,

In theory, vacation time is supposed to be something you negotiate as part of your employment contract. Conservatives believe that market forces will balance out the needs of the worker and the company, as companies with bad employment practices will have trouble finding employees.

In practice, that only works for high-demand positions with a small labor pool. Basically everyone else has no negotiating power because employers have a huge pool to pick from. Conservatives say employees can just go somewhere else to get a better job or go back to school (another topic), but that also doesn't work in when all the available jobs do the same thing.

Basically, it's an extension of rugged individualism. It's up to the individual to take care of themselves. The fact that the landscape in which most people must operate doesn't allow for it is ignored.

I doubt they have a 7 day work week. That would be unusual. But they probably do have zero PTO. Sick? Come to work or don't get paid. No vacations.

I personally have been at the same company for almost 20 years and have a bunch of banked sick time because I never got sick much. But last year I had to use 8 days because I have a toddler in daycare and I got sick a lot, for the first time in almost 20 years. I got written up. For using my banked sick time for sicknesses.

Pay or feriepenger?

Is this the minimum required, or just common?

We have 4 weeks annual leave (not including sick leave and public holidays) and I reckon it's not enough 🇦🇺

Probably because our union movement has been crushed by years of hostile governments and right wing media monopoly.

You spend an awful lot of time in the bank.

Zero. I can use some of the 7 for holidays.

Well, sort of. The state gives you 56 hours of sick leave, which isn't technically the same as vacation. Mental health, even without diagnosis, is a permitted use. My job didn't give me any grief when I used some of my time to cover the holidays, but I didn't have enough so some days I just didn't get paid. (You acrue time off by working, and I started late in the year)

Oh, and this company also really dragged their feet on answering my questions about it, and told me one rule that's just illegal here. I ended up looking it up myself, and thankfully they didn't push back.

https://www.ny.gov/programs/new-york-paid-sick-leave if you're morbidly curious.

Edit: they also had the nerve to send out "happy holidays!" Emails wishing me happy and healthy times. No pay, just thoughts and prayers.

Public holidays are not mandatory time off let alone paid in the US. Many employers that give paid time off do include at least some holidays, but which ones and how many is variable between employers. Some will give every federal holiday and others will be only the really big ones like Christmas, thanksgiving, independence day, etc.

One of the most exciting things about the job I currently have is that I get around 15 holiday days a year off, in addition to my normal vacation time. It's a rarity. My last two jobs only had 7 holiday days - that stretch from New years day to Memorial day (end of May) was always brutal.

My grandpa didn't understand fiction. He grew up in a company town and was working in the mines after he completed sixth grade (12 years old). It was and is truly sad. He'd say things like why would you bother with that nonsense when someone mentioned watching a movie or reading a book.

After he was forced to retire due to dementia, he drove to the places he worked to talk to the workers about work. He did this every weekday. Dementia progressed, as it does. After far too many fender benders and running out of gas a few times in the middle of nowhere, his wife and daughter had to take the keys. After that he watched TV. He watched mostly the news, fox news and NBC nightly news. Occasionally the history channel. It was "real" so it was all that mattered.

We hardly had anything to talk about. We were politically and religiously opposite. I will say he was a union man and lifelong Democrat, so at least he wouldn't have been down with any of the shit going on these days. I had dropped out of college and didn't get a good paying job until after he died, so I was just a failure.

But. We finally connected when I got him to watch the show Survivorman with Les Stroud. He loved that shit. It was real.

Yup, boomers took the easy way out and drowned themselves in work rather than organize to change the system.

I know this is a hot take but boomers who don't even know how to live without working after they have been on this planet for decades are pathetic, second in blame only to the cruel system that diminished them to shadows of their past selves.

Speaking to boomers here - shut up, turn your TV set to fox news off and take up birding or something else actually real, your work identity is a flimsy illusion of self, you need to actively explore who you are not contract it out to your job you old hateful, childish vampires of humanities' future.

...and yes before the inveitable "not all Boomers!", I know.

They've wrapped their entire sense of identity in working, their role at work

Speaking as an actual boomer, that is true of the men of my generation in particular. Many of them have zero hobbies or interests outside work, to the extent that retirement can kill them through depression. Their wives raised their children and run their social lives for them, and they often don't even have their own friends. So if their wife dies or leaves, they have to get another one or face the emptiness. These same men usually harbour huge resentment against women in general, blame us for ruining everything with our feminist nonsense. I've spent more than 50 years of my adult life dealing with these arseholes. My male friends are mostly much younger.

You don't need a house anyway, they don't want you to work from home any more.

You might be the only person in here that gets this. There's a very deep selfishness to the "American dream". Like crabs in a bucket, you gotta grind to get on top of as many people as possible so that there's less shit raining down from above. If you're lucky you'll have enough society below you that the work you do looks luxurious by comparison.

Literally everything is a farce, almost every product, every deal and agreement is an inherent ripoff, and there's a catch to everything short of taking a walk in a park.

shit, they towed my car

That's the rub though isn't it? Most are fed propaganda and believe it and fuck the rest who actually know this.

Especially how can you be productive? I mean you'd dig more holes if you work more hours, but mental work just breaks down when people are overworked.

Is the extra 8 weeks of long service PTO independent of the position you hold at a company?

Both jobs were only part time, so it wasn't every day, but it was still around 3 times a week, so recovering from it was difficult. It was dependent on when the trucks arrived.