America, the No vacation nation

To someone in business with lots of customers vs. just one (like those who have one job), this conversation seems much like a prison guard overhearing the prisoners talk about how to improve life in prison vs. how to get out of prison.

That being said, in my company, I generally give as much vacation or sick time that is needed or requested. Employees know damn well if they take two months off a year in any combination that they will not be desirable and someone else will likely get their opportunity. I do expect that short of emergencies that it will be preplanned so we can find the best way to deal with it. I most certainly don't pay for time not worked. We do the mature thing and come up with a fair rate of pay for the time that is worked. It seems far less complicated to pay someone say $20 an hour for 38 hours if two hours are taken off then to pay them $19 an hour but give them 2 hours of paid vacation per week that we now have to track and now will even limit the employee and will likely get them to make bad decisions about their time to "use it". In either case they make the same $760 and work 38 hours, but with "tracked vacation time" the employer has yet another homework assignment to do the tracking. ALL homework assignments result in lower pay for the employees. Let's just keep it simple and let the adults work out whatever system they want. In my companies there will never be paid time off unless forced on us...if I am paying and they are not working for it, we call that a bonus. It usually happens when the employees have done something more than expected with the resources at hand.

Don't forget that the employers finance the ultimate paid time off program through reductions in your pay you never even see.....the unemployment program. I am not arguing its place, just that it is paid time off, and typically quite a bit of it. Both parties also finance the SS system to the tune of about 1/7 the wage. That is often pay when folks are not working too, often for years.

Again, better to just be out of prison and work on public policy that allows more that level of freedom. Ahh, the woes of the employee class. My experience is that most that have complete control of how they stack their time each day, the upper class, the self employed class, work even more hours than the employee class and take less vacations. They work in a system where there are not as many barriers between productivity and prosperity. The more your regulate vacation time, the more disconnected the employee class's productivity will be from their prosperity, thus lowering the incentives to do well, increasing the desire to jump class, but lowering their ability to do so. This is a downward spiral.

You are focusing on the wrong target, it is not why are so many people not getting the vacation time they need, it is why are so many people essentially indentured to companies to the point where this even becomes a topic of public policy, why has it gotten to the point where these adults do not have the leverage to take care of themselves. The cultural issue is not one of vacations, it is that of systemic employment as a solution for everything. Long term employment by the largest of organizations, govt or private is generally not sustainable and will forever beg this type of adjustment.

And I don't know about some people's jobs but I just got back from a two week paid break and although someone was "covering" me I still had a week's worth of work and had to fix a couple major boo boo's. So while VL is easily replaced when on vacation. Many of us are more indispensable.