{"id":50762,"date":"2012-09-04T11:04:27","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T16:04:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=50762"},"modified":"2012-08-31T15:13:27","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T20:13:27","slug":"vacation-in-international-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/09\/04\/vacation-in-international-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Vacation in International Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

As I speculated years ago (here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>), it may be hard for Americans to imagine a world where the law guarantees them at least 20 paid vacation days per year.\u00a0 But such a world exists.\u00a0 It\u2019s called Europe.*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Americans are the lucky ones.\u00a0 As Mitt Romney has warned us \u201cEuropean-style benefits\u201d would\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cpoison the very spirit of America.\u201d\u00a0 Niall Ferguson, who weighs in frequently on history and economics, contrasts America\u2019s \u201cProtestant work ethic\u201d with what you find in Europe \u2013 an \u201catheist sloth ethic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The graph is a bit misleading. It shows only what the law requires of employers.\u00a0 Americans do get vacations.\u00a0 But here in America, how much vacation you get, or whether you get any at all, and whether it’s paid \u2013 that all depends on what you can negotiate with your employer.<\/p>\n

Since American vacations depend on what the boss will grant, some people get more paid vacation, some get less, and some get none.\u00a0 So it might be useful to ask which sectors of our economy are beehives of the work ethic and which are sloughs of sloth.\u00a0 (Ferguson\u2019s employer, for example, Harvard University, probably gives him three months off in the summer, plus a week or two or more in the winter between semesters, plus spring break, and maybe a few other days.\u00a0 I wonder how he would react if Harvard did away with these sloth-inducing policies.)<\/p>\n

The Wall Street Journal recently (here<\/a>) published a graph of BLS data on access to paid vacations; they break it up by industry near the bottom.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Those people who are cleaning your hotel room and serving your meals while you\u2019re on vacation — only about one in four can get any paid vacation days.\u00a0 And at the other end, which economic sector is most indulgent of sloth among its workforce?\u00a0 Wall Street.\u00a0 Four out of five there get paid vacation.<\/p>\n

How much paid vacation do we get?\u00a0 That depends on sector, but it also depends on length of service.\u00a0 As the Journal says,<\/p>\n

Europeans also get more time off: usually a bare minimum of four weeks off a year. Most Americans have to stay in a job for 20 years to get that much, according to BLS data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

—————————<\/p>\n

* The graph is from five years ago, but I doubt things have changed much. The US still has no federal or state laws requiring any paid vacation days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. As I speculated years ago (here\u00a0and\u00a0here), it may be hard for Americans to imagine a world where the law guarantees them at least 20 paid vacation days per year.\u00a0 But such a world exists.\u00a0 It\u2019s called Europe.* Americans are the lucky ones.\u00a0 As Mitt Romney has warned us \u201cEuropean-style benefits\u201d would\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,34,55,260,10514,1765,1766,1767,1811,1770,2055,2026,1776,1777,4128,1817,1819,1821,1824,1790,1791,1795,1802,1804,1805,1789,3920,304,76],"class_list":["post-50762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-education","tag-gender","tag-international-comparisons","tag-leisure","tag-nation-australia","tag-nation-austria","tag-nation-belgium","tag-nation-britainthe-u-k","tag-nation-canada","tag-nation-denmark","tag-nation-finland","tag-nation-france","tag-nation-germany","tag-nation-greece","tag-nation-ireland","tag-nation-italy","tag-nation-japan","tag-nation-mexico","tag-nation-new-zealand","tag-nation-norway","tag-nation-portugal","tag-nation-spain","tag-nation-sweden","tag-nation-switzerland","tag-nation-the-netherlands","tag-nation-united-states","tag-the-state","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50762"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50766,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50762\/revisions\/50766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}