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Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

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Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> earns 7 sick days 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…

Except for some drastic cases I've not seen people taking more than 2/3 single days a year. 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…

What countries? Above peoplemwrote about Germany.and didn't mention such strange limit of first few days. Also in Poland there is no such thing. You can have a sick leave for 1 day and you get paid the same amount as if you get 3 weeks - 80% of your salary.

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#62
post #49

Why does it say 0 for the US? You have Thanksgiving, Christmas, 4th of July and more? Are they unpaid days off?

The rest of the world seems to believe that if the government doesn't mandate it, it doesn't happen.

well, then what happens when the company decides to revoke your pto? where do you put that into the statistics?

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick... 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 require…

> earns 7 sick days 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…

2-3 weeks is probably an average skewed by burnt out (or seriously sick, cancer) people taking 9 months to get better

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#65

I dont want to derail the conversation about the article but what's with two separate accounts posting within 5 minutes of each other both going off about America inventing transistors? I wonder how much vacation time the people who invented the transistor took each year. Edit: up to three mentions of transistors now. Bizarre

That is surprising, unlike the expected USA bad rhetoric

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I included them to show that, on average, PTO does not need to be used for sick time and to show that the vacation time is vacation time. > "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…

I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days? If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectanc…

If we avoid work when we're sick so that we don't get other people sick, wouldn't that result in a healthier population? I guess I'm confused as to why it wouldn't result in that?

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.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db371.htm

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#67
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I included them to show that, on average, PTO does not need to be used for sick time and to show that the vacation time is vacation time. > "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…

The sick leave has to go through the healthcare system. That said, there are doctors that would just blindly approve, but it's not exactly a norm. A lot of those sick days are also childcare.

Genuinely curious now: If you have a cold or a cough, or maybe a slight fever, do you have to talk to a doctor to get a day or two off of work?

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you're serious, as a European, I applaud your willingness to hurt yourself so we can have transistors and also have 40 days off each year.

US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s, when corporate taxes were much higher, education, housing and healthcare were far cheaper, wealth was more evenly distributed, and government investment in infrastructure and R&D was more about delivery than corporate/academic grift. Perhaps there's a reason it has declined since.

> US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s

How does one even measure that? And who would even try and claim that?

> when corporate taxes were much higher

The corporate tax rates in the 70s and 80s were just as high as they were in the 50s and 60s [0]. And the capital gains taxes were actually lower during the 50s and 60s than they were in the 70s and 80s. Why did inventiveness stop if the higher tax rates were helpful?

   1952-1963 Over $25,000 52%
   1975-1978 Over $50,000 48% ($50k in 1978 is ~$21k in 1952)
So the tax rate was ever so slightly lower, but kicked in sooner, once you compare apples to apples.

But surely Reagan did some bad things, right?

   The maximum tax rate on capital gains was capped at 34 percent for 1987
   From April 1, 1954, through Calendar Year 1969, the maximum tax rate on capital gains was 25 percent.
> government investment in infrastructure and R&D was more about delivery than corporate/academic grift

Grift in the 50s and 60s was pervasive and everywhere. Eisenhower was warning about the Military Industrial Complex in 1961.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-corpor...

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#69
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s, when corporate taxes were much higher, education, housing and healthcare were far cheaper, wealth was more evenly distributed, and government investment in infrastructure and R&D was more about delivery than corporate/academic grift. Perhaps there's a reason it has declined since.

100% disagree. SmartPhones, Cloud, AI. Just three things that happened in the past 20 years and were brought to the world by US companies.

Another example: the first commercial cell phone network was in Chicago in 1983, brought to us by AT&T and Motorola. What could be more impactful to modern existence than that?

Re: Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off

#70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days? If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectanc…

If we avoid work when we're sick so that we don't get other people sick, wouldn't that result in a healthier population? I guess I'm confused as to why it wouldn't result in that? 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 mortal…

It is hard to know for sure, there could be some advantages to more pathogenic exposure in terms of group immunity but it is challenging to study and the particular types of pathogens that get passed around would matter a lot too.
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