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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 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.
Better job gets more benefits.
'Nearly half' of the top earners get 10 or more days of vacation, meaning that more than half of them get less than 2 weeks a year off - and it's much worse for low earners.
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.
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.
DaveyJJ
Actually it was to have someone else do their job long enough to see if they were cooking the books. We had annual, independent financial audits, and not doing this would trigger an audit finding.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.