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The Higher Your Salary, the More Time Your Employer Will Pay You Not To Work (qz.com)
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.
10 days is considered generous? That seems pretty low to me, and I'm sure it's considered uncivilized by most other modern countries.
Also, first ever first post?
Not only that, Europeans live longer, are healthier, happier, and have more (and better) sex than Americans.
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.]