Want more vacation time? Move to Finland

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/233523

The Baltic nation allots a minimum of 30 paid vacation days a year to all employees after their first year of work, plus 14 paid statutory holidays.

This ain't unusual in Europe. Most people get at least 4 weeks.

We treat vacation/holiday as some sort of special treat in North America. It's ridiculous.

Near the bottom of the CEPR's list of 21 are Canada and Japan, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days.

The lowest spot is occupied by the United States, which does not require employers to provide any paid vacation, and where, typically, large companies allow for 15 vacation days and 10 paid holidays for full-time employees of 10 years, according to Mercer.

You're shitting me, right? U.S. companies don't have to provide paid vacations?

The phrase "indentured labour" comes to mind here, folks.

 

Well, slavery was still legal 144 years ago. We're a little behind in the times.

 

This is why when choosing a career, I narrowed down my choices to this and teaching fairly quickly.

I lived and worked in Europe for two years, and there's no way I could have come back here to working for 11 1/2 months out of the year.

In teaching, there are the summers and other breaks.

In this, it's similar. I have time over Christmas to wind down as well as over spring break before burning every one of the 4 1/2 weeks of actual vacation I've built up during the summer. Right now, I'm in the middle of working eight days between June 25 and July 30 ... and if I couldn't do that, there's no way I'd care as much or have the desire to do the best work I can.

 

Wonder if the Finland sportswriters get to use their time, or if they have to give it up because the shop's down a head during the slow season?

 

They are always fully staffed, so it's never an issue.

Anyway, hockey and soccer are the only sports with pro leagues, I think. According to the government, between 2000 and 4000 compete at a national level.

 

I get 30 days vacation/year, federal holidays and unlimited sick days. Not so bad, I guess.

 

I had a friend tell me about his stay in Helsinki over Christmas during the World Juniors, and his sitting in the perpetual blackness in a smoke-thick bar in the shitbox Holiday Inn, surrounded by weeping hookers, Jingle Bells and glasses tinkling.

I'm guessing all that vacation is the only thing keeping Finns from killing themselves into extinction.

 

Every year the survey comes out that Americans take less time off than any nation in the industrialized world and it makes me sad. At the same time, I don't know what to do other than taking every last hour of vacation I'm allotted. How did how hard/how much you work take on such mythic status in our society?

By the way, at my current shop you don't get personal time until you've been there three months, whereas at my last one the HR person sat me down on my first day and said, "As of now you have 49 hours and 15 minutes of vacation to use by the end of the year."

 

Absolutely. At one place in my hometown - a food service-type place where they prefab sandwiches sold in vending machines and convenience stores and the like - my friend was offered a job there. Never said a thing about ANY vacation time.

Insane. Sadly, we've become accustomed to it. When the Japanese - a nation as obsessed with its work ethic as any in the world - are outdoing us, we have a problem that we're ignoring. Wanna bet that continues?