66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work
66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work
The average American is lucky to get 11 vacation days from their employer each year.
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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.
I don’t know if this holds true outside of my awareness, but I am only hearing folks refer to it as PTO (paid time off) these days. The place I work goes as far as to blend all types of days into one bucket, to be used for sick time or whatever the person needs.
Yup same here. My parents had both sick days and vacation days. Sick days were PTO you could use the day of, and vacation days needed to be scheduled ahead of time.
Everywhere I've worked that has either had no paid time off at all, or it has just been one bucket and you had to schedule it no less than 48hrs in advance, or they would automatically deny it. As in it would never reach a human being, the timekeeping system would just reject it outright.
Our system allows all time to be taken day of, if needed.
I'm hearing more and more of the PTO term lately as well but still see some companies that categorize sick days in a separate non-carryover bucket. Vacation days may be a more generational thing that is phasing out I still hear that term (it's in some of the posts here), and then see it in articles such as this one so it's still out there conveying the wrong idea.
Lol I end up using my PTO as sick time except the now our policy only allows 4 sick days and we lost our point system and instead get fired after the 3rd occurrence. If I weren't WFH I'd have to find another job because I can't make it out the door most days. Also it still eats up my PTO to have an absence. I haven't had an absence in almost 2 years and I've had to work with migraines and running to the bathroom. Next month I have scheduled most of it off but I'll be recovering from work and sleeping lol. I don't need this job as we don't have kids so we've saved up plenty to live off of but the lack of health insurance would be problematic, though not sure that paying 400 a month for it right now isn't actually worse for what I get. Good thing I've got dual citizenship and can escape to Europe anytime I want lol! Just not back to Italy... our Healthcare system may be free but the quality is atrocious. But if the US pulls its head out of its ass and decides to actually care to improve itself I'm all for it. As it is right now it's just creating tired insane violent idiots.
Exaaaactly. I get 2 weeks vacation/PTO/sick days all year. That's 10 days. I need to reserve at least 5 of those for potential sick days (either for me or to take care of the family or whatever), go to doctor appointments, take car in to mechanic, stay home for air conditioner to be worked on or whatever. That kind of stuff. Then I use at least 2 or 3 over the year for holidays like thanksgiving, Easter, or Christmas so I can take care of the parents and family members that are in town.
So that leaves me with about 2-3 days all year for an actual vacation... If I go anywhere overseas I'm using pretty much 2 full days for travel there (travel there, travel back). So if I try to max it out I can realistically go on a legitimate vacation overseas for maaaaybe 1 or 2 days. Like a weekend trip to Italy or something. Nice 👍. it sucks so much. I am so jealous of people that go to like London for 2 weeks or a week long cruise or something. Only once in my life have I gone anywhere for a week or longer on vacation during my work career. The only way I could do it was to go on unpaid leave during that time.