What the fuck is wrong with 34% of Americans?
I think there’s a lot of good old moralization going on out there. «Young people are getting lazy» etc. Especially from old rich people who got everything handed to them.
They’re probably mostly rich or retired, so they can take as much vacation as they want anyway.
Well they’d best join a union then, because those cunts upstairs aren’t just going to give it to them.
Although personally I’d rather work through August just to avoid millions of families with kids everywhere. Holidays are so expensive at that time of year.
The way the law works here is you get five weeks vacation every year and have a right (but not an obligation) to take four of those consecutive between June and August. You must however take four weeks of vacation every year, the rest you can save for up to five years (before you have to take them as well).
Oh, and to really blow your mind, if you get sick during vacation, those count as sick days and you get the vacation back.
I hope that this example can show that more humane treatment of workers is attainable and realistic. We were not given these rights by benevolent overlords; our parents, grandparents etc. fought for them, and so can you. Unionize!
I really hate the term “vacation days.” I’m not going to Disneyland everytime I’m out of the office. Most of the time its stuff like having the HVAC technician over during their 4-hour service call window; taking my family member to have surgery; recovering from the flu/covid; taking a mental health day or catch-up day for weekday-only errands.
This might be where some of the missing 34% are not agreeing for more days. The label is part of the problem. Hell I want more vacation days so that I CAN squeeze an actual vacation in there.
The USA had a chance to start again and get so many things right. So why are they so backwards with some things?
We’ve had legally-protected paid leave in the UK for almost a century now. Granted, we were the first in the world, but most of Europe and many other countries now have similar protections. Many of which are more generous than the UK’s.
That’s not to mention the myriad of other laws and protections covering unfair dismissal (the “at will” system is fucking dystopian, sorry), a years paid maternity leave, statutory sick pay, mandatory employer pension contributions, working time regulations and mandatory redundancy pay. All of which have no federally-enforced equivalent.
I’m honestly a bit shocked that only 66% support PTO. Surely it’s a no-brainer?
Is it a size thing? Is the idea of looking out for each other just untenable in such a large, diverse place?
I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a place where 34% of people have such an individualistic “I’ve got mine” mentality, that they don’t even support mechanisms that virtually every other developed country collectively agrees is the fucking minimum needed in order to live reasonable existence.
US has PTO, it is just much less than Europe.
The reason there are people who don’t support it is because of conservative shame culture. If you aren’t rich, it is because you are lazy. They don’t want to take anything away from the rich because they earned it and deserve it. If that means the worker suffers, then the worker should just work harder so they can be rich too.
