The Higher Your Salary, the More Time Your Employer Will Pay You Not To Work (qz.com) 455
The best-paid workers in the US not only make more money than many of their colleagues, they also tend to get more paid vacation days. An anonymous reader shares a report: An annual survey of of employee benefits conducted by the US government shows that, in 2017, nearly half of the people in the top 25% of earners received at least 10 days of paid vacation. The bottom 25% was not so lucky -- only around a tenth of them received such generous leave. Paid vacation time is often overlooked in measures of pay inequality in the US, because the value of time off does not appear in the household income statistics.
In other words. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vacation leave is nothing more than additional pay and in most companies is negotiable.
If you are working as a burger flipper your salary is not that high and the extra benefits are the same.
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I've been told that vacation is less negotiable than salary with the rationale that vacation is measurable/noticeable by peers and can create friction when one employee is deemed "away too much".
I haven't had luck with employers negotiating vacation unless they were being really minimalist about it. You can usually get it up to the "max" for that position, but not beyond that. I had one employer tell me flat out that vacation was 100% non-negotiable but willingly gave up $10k in salary to make up for the
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I had a job that let you purchase additional PTO. Mostly these days now, I just get "unlimited PTO" because it doesn't show up as a liability on the books, you can't cash it out if you leave, and most people won't take as much as they probably could. Current job insists that I take "At least three weeks a year" and also does a holiday shutdown. no complaints here so far.
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The old system worked better for me. The use-it-or-lose-it was a good incentive to actually use the vacation. You'd even get a reminder from HR that you have too much vacation on the books. For me it was mostly end of the year, add a week onto the holiday break. And you can always tell the boss you gotta use it NOW instead of waiting until things aren't as hectic. But with off-the-books it removes the incentive, and the boss doesn't feel like she's stealing your vacation if she says no.
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I had two different people tell me that, a friend of the family who ran a fairly successful recruiting agency and a friend with hiring responsibility.
I suppose a lot of it depends on how time off is scheduled. Some places can have a kind of contentious scheduling process for time off and the schedule can be highly visible and easy to count who has how many days off. New hires waltzing in with the "after 5 year" time off package creates some resentment.
Give the new guy $20k more than everyone else and it's
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Then again in the UK you get 25 days minimum plus national holidays by law, and I'm up to 30 days with the option to buy an extra 5.
No, the minimum in the UK is 5.6 weeks = 28 days including bank holiday, but a good employer will give you 23-25 days PLUS eight days bank holiday.
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I worked for major financial institution for a long time and found that the salary budget was very limited but that they would, and could negotiate time off without adding to the budget. Before I left I had 5 weeks of vacation and they had a program that allowed employees to pay for an week off by setting aside a small amount of money from each pay check leaving me with 6 weeks of paid vacation each year plus my sick leave which I used all of as genuine sick days or spontaneous mental days. As others have m
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>I worked for major financial institution for a long time and found that the salary budget was very limited but that they would, and could negotiate time off without adding to the budget.
I had a similar experience in the insurance industry. The last six years before I retired I had 22 vacation days and 13 paid holidays. I also required people in my organization to actually take their vacation. People in sensitive financial positions were required to take two consecutive weeks off at least once a ye
Re:In other words. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In other words. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vacation leave is nothing more than additional pay and in most companies is negotiable.
Only in most American companies is it negotiable. In the rest of the world they are mandatory, and we laugh even at the top 25% of earners.
Re: In other words. (Score:3)
Everything in the US is negotiable. It's the American dream. Being truly salaried, I get unlimited PTO which is more than I ever did in Europe being "salaried" which doesn't really exist there and at a higher rate too. The PTO reporting is just for statistics and rate calculations and comes out to ~35% across the workforce when you include sick and holidays.
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The metric that really matters for the average Joe is disposable median income adjusted for purchasing power parity [wikipedia.org], because that's how much buying power at le
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$85K/year, 6 weeks + 1 day paid vacation, insurance all paid by my company, flexible working hours (nominally 34.5 hours per week), paid lunch break, 6 months severance if they fire me, and a whole host of other benefits.
I think I'll stay right here, instead of trying my luck in The American Nightmare.
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we live in the place most people want to go to
LOL, you live in a bubble of delusion. Many people no longer even want to *visit* let alone live in the USA.
So yeah, enjoy those days off in the one bedroom apartment you don't own, the tiny car you drive, with the one kid you can afford.
There is so much wrong with that but let me educate you:
- Most people own their apartments with just enough bedrooms for the number of people living there. McMansions are truly bizarre concepts.
- The tiny cars we drive are the tiny cars we want. Sure I could buy a dodge charger, but I prefer a car that fits in normal parking spaces and isn't an absolute pain in the arse. Sure my car is second hand, it
Re:In other words. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your manager is letting them charge you for PTO in a week you've worked at least 40 hours in, then it's time you either say down and had a talk with him about expectations, or started shopping for a new manager.
If you are unable to shop for a new manager, then you're either under-qualified for your job or you're getting something from your job more valuable to you than the extra PTO time would be. You're not a slave.
10 days??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing (Score:5, Funny)
I'm in Canada and I get 365 days off per year!
Oh wait, I'm homeless...
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Lucky you, your'e saving a fortune in rent or mortgage payments.
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Or you've out-Ferrissed Tim Ferriss, and you've managed to have some extremely productive 1/4 days.
You probably make ends meet on the proceeds from your best-selling book The 6-Hour Workyear, into which you invested a monumental twenty-hours of finger-blurring energy over the past four years.
(The other four hours were spent reorganizing your pop-up office TV tray.)
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As long as internet is working in your iglu in winter, you are not really homeless!
Re:10 days??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Europe we get 120 paid days off per year! What a country!
Europe isn't a country. You must be an American.
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I live in America, yet I'm not American. I'm Canadian! Get your own name for your own citizens, U.S.A.!
Re: 10 days??? (Score:2)
If you guys lived a bit further from the line, people may not be confused! Right now, it looks like you are just outside the US to say "We are outside the US". You guys are like the froth on top of the beer... it's still beer!!
Serious note: The above is in jest, I actually do like my Canadian coworkers and their culture. Summers up there are awesome.
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Yeah, those 19 days of the year are the best, aren't they?
You don't get it (Score:4, Funny)
That's why when people joke "Canada has two seasons, Winter and Summer." It isn't a joke, it's been 8 months of straight winter.
You clearly don't get it. The reason it's a joke is that really there is only one season. We had a _high_ of -11C the other day which is not bad given it's about the 109th January today.
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You may be a Terran but I'm a Protoss.
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Not only that, Europeans live longer [cnn.com], are healthier [minq.com], happier [cnbc.com], and have more (and better) sex [alternet.org] than Americans.
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120 would be obviously insane, but here in Italy I get 26.
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Generous? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, first ever first post?
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I'm just gonna blame Slashdot. Because why not.
Re:Generous? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Generous? (Score:2)
I think it's a poor enumeration. I have never had less than 15 days at any of my positions in the past 20 years. BUT, I never had sick leave. I think many companies have weeks of sick leave on top of the 0-10 PTO days.
But I agree with the general gist of the post thou. Every interview I went to said PTO was not negotiable. Even the type of businesses where the employees would mostly work during Dec/Jan, they wouldn't officially give make up or extra days.
I thought it was kind of stupid. I declined such pla
Re:Generous? (Score:4, Funny)
I get 37 days and I sure as hell am not anywhere near the top 25% of earners in my country.
Greatings from socialist Europe.
Was that a typo or just a play on words, you can decide :)
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So why is it surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
Work/Life balance (Score:5, Interesting)
10 vacation days is not a lot.
The work/life balance in the US is horrible. The typical 9-to-5 doesn't exist-it's closer to an 8-to-7 schedule if you're salaried.
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10 vacation days is not a lot.
The work/life balance in the US is horrible. The typical 9-to-5 doesn't exist-it's closer to an 8-to-7 schedule if you're salaried.
I guess I'm lucky then. 7:30-4 with an hour for lunch. 10 years with the company and have 3 weeks vac(get 4 next year, it tops out at 5 weeks), plus 14 days paid time off earned each year with unused time rolling to the next year (up to a certain amount). Of course, I only make about 60k w/ bonus so the pay could be better.
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3 Weeks vac, does that mean 15 work days or 21? (A week has 7 days, if you only get the 15 work days between weekends as vacation, you are a poor sod.)
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In Europe, and that includes Norway, vacation is usually counted in "work days".
So if one says "3 weeks" it is a bit ambigous, don't you think so?
As "3 weeks" would be 21 days, and that would translate to more than 4 calendar weeks and as the parent is obviously an american and by law only has 10 days vacation, I guess the question is valid.
On the other hand ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of vacation days you receive often increases with your number of years at a company, as, often, does your pay. New(er), perhaps younger, employees often start out with lower salary and fewer vacation days. How is this a revelation? In addition, people higher up the salary scale may have more experience, perhaps from somewhere else, and negotiated more vacation days during the hiring and/or annual review process. Less experienced employees don't have that leverage.
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The number of vacation days you receive often increases with your number of years at a company, as, often, does your pay. New(er), perhaps younger, employees often start out with lower salary and fewer vacation days. How is this a revelation? In addition, people higher up the salary scale may have more experience, perhaps from somewhere else, and negotiated more vacation days during the hiring and/or annual review process. Less experienced employees don't have that leverage.
I would hope the study took that into account, if not, your thoughts have merit.
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Duh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Better job gets more benefits.
Never had vacation (Score:2)
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Unionize! (Score:3)
Unionize!
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The woes of being a IT contractor
You are responsible for your own vacations. They are the time between gigs. If you can't afford to take some time off, you are just bad at budgeting and planning.
An advantage: At the end of your contract term, when your customer asks to renew, you just say, "I have a two week job to take care of right now. See you when that's over." When they scream about the inconvenience, you just tell them that this wouldn't have happened if you had been a direct employee.
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Indeed. I'd recommend finding 2 other IT contractors that you don't mind working with and form a 3-person consultant business. Then you can either charge more or you can accept more than 3 jobs at once. Sometimes 5 small jobs pays better than 3 full time ones.
Strange.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's almost as if employees are being offered pay and benefits that are directly proportional to the value they bring to the company. Huh. Whoulda thunk
This is because sexism and racism! We all know the only reason top employees earn more and given more perks is because of entrenched patriarchy and white privilege (Never mind that many of top earners in tech are Chinese and Inidan). Down with the white hetero males!
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Re:Strange.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's almost as if employees are being offered pay and benefits that are directly proportional to the value they bring to the company. Huh. Whoulda thunk
Except that's not how it has worked in the real world since the late 1960s in the USA.
For that you might want to look at a few facts about pay (NY Times, Economic Policy Institute, UN economics reports, etc). 1) What the average US worker would be earning if their salary had increased at the same pace as CEO's salaries? Slight more than $160,000. 2) The fact that the average US worker is earning slightly less than their 1970 counterpart when adjusted for inflation, 4% less, in fact. 3) The average US CEO earned 20x an average workers salary in 1970, and now that's closer to 350% It was 296% in 2013, and has neared 380% since then. 4) While the average worker's productivity has risen 248% since 1973, wages have only risen 108%. 5) Real average hourly wages of young college graduates has fallen every year since 2000. 6) If minimum wage in the US has matched productivity gains, it'd be over $18/hour.
But please, keep thinking pay structure is all about the actual monetary and intangible (brand) value someone brings to an organization if you like. I'd suggest that those who are making more money, might possibly be doing that since the system is becoming increasingly rigged for them (and by them) to do so.
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You have to remember the job pool was much smaller in the 70s so people would get paid more.
The fact that most women now work (nothing wrong with that so don't read into this) means that the available employee pool doubled.
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Correct. Simple supply and demand. Plus since women are typically willing to work for less, many companies, like mine, prefer women candidates over males. The last eight developers I've interviewed were all women. None could do the job which isn't unexpected since you're picking from a much smaller pool of candidates. Add in the fact that the last three women we hired were either pregnant when we hired them or got pregnant shortly after, it screws over the rest of the team. I finally got enough people
Huh? (Score:2)
It's almost like vacation and other benefits are part of the salary negotiation. Once your basic needs are covered you can divert more of your compensation in to these instead of base pay.
I am a bit concerned that someone is just figuring this out now.
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Of course, its Quartz, so they are just trolling on social status, gender, race, and wealth memes. The very next article trolls on about how whites are racist because a higher percentage of them own homes than blacks.
But how many do they actually use? (Score:2)
Who would have thought? (Score:2)
It's almost like benefits and salary are both part of the compensation an employer gives you in exchange for your labor, and so more valuable (to the employer) or lower supply labor ends up getting higher benefits and salary than less valuable/higher supply labor.
Wow... that's news to me. (Score:2)
Of course, I'm not an American.... but being neighbours, I didn't realize that our labour laws were actually *THAT* different in this regard (I knew about some differences, of course. but I didn't think they were different about vacation time).
Here in Canada, employees are entitled to a paid stat holiday, regardless of whether you are scheduled to work that day or not, if you have been employed for more than 30 days, and have worked at least 15 of the last 30 days. If you are not scheduled to work on a
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Wow. That is terrible. Here in Europe we get 160 paid days off a year. It is the LAW!
Are you counting weekends as paid days off? I mean, I guess we could do that too by averaging our weekly income over seven days instead of five.
Moral of the story (Score:2)
Get an education and earn experiences that companies will value. If you are valued then you will be compensate monetarily as well as in perks like additional time off.
If you are not valued, then you'll be treated like a cog in the system and discarded as soon as a cheaper, younger cog is available.
oh the unfairness of it all! (Score:2)
In actual fact, high income earners tend to work substantially more than low income earners, so the fact that that they nominally more vacations hardly matters. People working around 60h/week [dqydj.com] make a median of $63000, whereas pepole working 40h/week make a median of $38000. A week or two of extra paid vacation isn't even a blip compared to 20h/week differences in work.
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10 Day is not much (Score:2)
There are 52 weeks in a year. 10 days is two weeks. That is only 4%... the difference between making $100,000 a year and $104,000.
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People who get paid more get paid more? (Score:2)
Meritocracy (Score:2)
I'm not trying to make any of you feel bad about your life choices, but I worked my entire adult life getting three months' vacation every year, plus a week for Spring Break and a week over the holidays.
As others here have said, you get paid what you're worth, I guess.
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I'm not trying to make any of you feel bad about your life choices, but I worked my entire adult life getting three months' vacation every year, plus a week for Spring Break and a week over the holidays.
Guessing you're a teacher? There are definitely some perks to that life, though the downside is that you'll never get vacation at other times of year (e.g. going on a ski trip in January).
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's pretty darn embarrassing for a first world county: in Europe even a minimum wage McDonald's drive through worker can expect around 5 weeks of paid vacation in his first year of employment, plus a dozen or so days for national holidays.
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Not so much. The UK has all those policies and has a rate comparable to the US (not quite sure which is the real value, 4.1 or 8.6 for the US; UK has only 4.2%).
Over here, 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays, which is another 6 I think) is standard. And it goes up from there..
The price paid is generally lower overall pay packet (I know I could earn a lot more in the US, but I like my vacation days too much to worry about that).
2 Week is Standard! (Score:2)
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Who wrote this fucking article.
Probably Jeff Bezos trying to squeeze extra out of his warehouse workers.
10 days is NOT a lot! (Score:2)
Here is Europe the legal minimum number of days of for anyone is 20 days. Plus national holidays.
I really can't understand how you can think 10 days is a lot. I get 9 days a year just as national holidays
You guys are screwed over!
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Duh (Score:2)
Somebody had to do a survey to discover this?
30 days by law (Score:2)
Here we have close to 30 days by law.
Most people have 32 to 35 days.
I personally would not go below 90 days ... but that is not fully vacation, half of it is sports the majourity of the rest is studying new stuff, mostly project related.
The USA is a place completely out of question for working as a European (unless you want to do rocket science, work for Intel or Apple etc.)
I can not "relax" at a wok place, even if we would run on "low demand", and I should be present, I would always be kind of "high alert"
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No big surprise. Plus an idea. (Score:2)
Yeah this isn't exactly a big surprise when you give the topic a few seconds of thought. To incentivize employee retention, companies often raise paid vacation time. My previous employer raised paid vacation time to 3 weeks after 5 years, 4 weeks after 12 years, and 5 weeks after 18 years. During that time, pay increased at about 3% annually. So more senior employees get higher wages and increased paid vacation time. No big surprise there.
The problem for employees is that "paid vacation" is really something [affordanything.com]
Was seniority correlated as a factor? (Score:2)
This is absolutely true (Score:2)
One of my past employers paid me a huge sum just to go away and never come back.
Unfortunately (for them) the state department of labor and industries still found me and I filled them in on the working conditions there.
10 days of vacation is terrible. (Score:5, Informative)
My first real employment gave 10 days, rising to 15 days after a few years of tenure, which was the same package my wife had for her first few fulltime jobs. Then I got a job at a place which STARTED at 15 days, and built to 25 days, and I realized - 10 days of vacation isn't some blessing for top performers, it's a sign of how broken American employment is. With only 10 days it becomes really challenging to cover your various life events (sibling's graduation, niece's wedding, etc) and also take any sort of worthwhile vacation. So you end up spending it in dribs and drabs, maybe with a one-week block somewhere, or you don't take minimal vacation for a few years to bank time for something longer in the future.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying people should just be slackers. But 10 days per year is unhealthy.
[And I realize that this is #firstworldproblem, given the many people who completely lack control over their working time and have effectively zero vacation days, which is also completely broken of us as a society.]
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10 days is shit benefits. I got more than that in an entry/level position straight out of college.