131–140 of 424 posts
How many Americans can only afford health coverage via their workplace plan? How many Americans live in right-to-work states and can be dismissed without a reason? Add that together and you have a lot of fear.
Nitpick: you're referring to at-will employment, not right-to-work. Right-to-work laws mean that you can't be forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment. At-will employment means that you can (theoretically) be fired or quit at any time for no reason.
Usually the only time Americans can take long vacations is between jobs. I wonder how many actually change jobs just for this reason. I asked for 4 consecutive weeks off to travel Europe once at a previous employer (I had worked there 5 years with no more then a week and a half off) and they denied the request. So I found another job and made sure I had a 4 week break between the two.
I've done this, though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time. I was working for Sun Microsystems, which gave me two weeks of vacation time. Sun was doing a forced shutdown over the week of the 4th of July, which burned 4 days, and then there was the inevitable "shutdown" over christmas break, which burned another three days. This left me with 3 days of "elective" vacation time. A wedding took care of those. I…
How common is this exactly? Because this sounds like a company that is really, really screwing it's employees.
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Oh wow, that's the first I've ever heard of that. That would not be acceptable for me. I think I'll be asking for more vacation time in future contracts, too. I managed to secure extra in the first year of my current contract because I had a need (planned trip) but in the future, I'm just going to require more. Of course, benefits and pay are interchangeable, so I might just request the ability to take unpaid vacatio…
I've started making vacation time a major part of the negotiation when taking a new position and in all instances I've brought it up during the interview process the interviewer acted alarmed. Even with my current position with a really cool small web shop they ended up interviewing me a 2nd time before offering the position. The key topic of conversation during the 2nd interview was basically the CEO trying to figur…
It wasn't always like this in Europe. Extended vacation time was one of the many hard-fought rights won by the socialist/trade-unionist movements of the past century throughout the continent. Not even Thatcher dared attacking that right (she dropped a few national holidays here and there, instead). Things didn't turn out quite the same on the other side of the pond, sadly, and this is the result.
That may be true but here, in Europe (esp. Eastern), many people go years without taking more than few days of vacation. One, you're discouraged to take time off -- you can lose your job if you're not "devoted". Two, you have to work over capacity to support yourself and your family.
Yugoslavia Socialism -> 4-5 weeks at least, plus all religioous holidays and all communist free days. Capitalism -> 1-2 weeks maximum, religious on, communist off.
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Here it is, and it's awesome: http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...
you can do that only if you are a senior dev.. what do junior devs, recent college grads do?
My biggest life regret was not realizing this at the time. I jumped into the workforce and pursued my career at 95 mph.
I should have spent a year travelling.
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Also please note that this is paid vacation we're talking about. In Sweden, we have five weeks of vacation by law. And, the right to take four of those weeks consecutively .
The latter is pretty nice - even in Germany, you only have a right to 2 consecutive weeks.
For this reason we have the "industrial vacation" in July when all heavy industry shuts down, since it's easier if everyone and the entire supply chain shut down at the same time.
One result of this is that businesses chuck human redundancy out the window. Often there's only one person who can do a business critical task, and as they can't really be gone from work for that long, the business gets by. From an business uptime perspective, forced "downtime" of employees through vacation is actually a good way to force the creation of backup systems for business process.
This makes the whole inustial and coorporate sector grind to a halt. A lot of factories literally shut down for a few weeks.
Fortunately, it is rather well coordinated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done this, though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time. I was working for Sun Microsystems, which gave me two weeks of vacation time. Sun was doing a forced shutdown over the week of the 4th of July, which burned 4 days, and then there was the inevitable "shutdown" over christmas break, which burned another three days. This left me with 3 days of "elective" vacation time. A wedding took care of those. I…
Until today I have never heard of a US company forcing employee's to use "forced shutdown" days - which I'm interpreting to mean the company telling people they have off on a certain day - as vacation days, and this is the second time (at least) it's been mentioned in this thread. How common is this exactly? Because this sounds like a company that is really, really screwing it's employees.