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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.
In other words, the more you are a value to a company the more they will pay you in salary and benefits.
Vacation leave is nothing more than additional pay and in most companies is negotiable.
If you are working as a burger flipper your salary is not that high and the extra benefits are the same.
Here in Europe we get 120 paid days off per year! What a country!
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?
So why is it surprising? It seems like basic economics to me. People with more in-demand and marketable skills can obtain both a higher salary and more benefits.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Good jobs have good benefits.
I'm in Canada and I get 365 days off per year!
Oh wait, I'm homeless...
#DeleteFacebook
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.
The number of vacation days you receive often increases with your number of years at a company, as, often, does your pay. New(er), perhaps younger, employees often start out with lower salary and fewer vacation days. How is this a revelation? In addition, people higher up the salary scale may have more experience, perhaps from somewhere else, and negotiated more vacation days during the hiring and/or annual review process. Less experienced employees don't have that leverage.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Better job gets more benefits.
I've never had a job that offered vacation days. The woes of being a IT contractor, never hired, always used awhile and thrown away
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I would dare say that in that bottom 25% are also where the part timers are. Part timers don't get vacation, traditionally.
Next group in there is going to be low wage factory/retail/service workers.
The highest paid "workers" are generally those with "relationships" and other "business skills" that bring much more to the table than day after day productivity.
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
It's almost like vacation and other benefits are part of the salary negotiation. Once your basic needs are covered you can divert more of your compensation in to these instead of base pay.
I am a bit concerned that someone is just figuring this out now.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
For those higher paid employees, an equally interesting question is how many days of vacation do they actually use?
It's almost like benefits and salary are both part of the compensation an employer gives you in exchange for your labor, and so more valuable (to the employer) or lower supply labor ends up getting higher benefits and salary than less valuable/higher supply labor.
I'm sorry, did you refer to 10 days of vacation as "generous leave"? I wouldn't even consider a job that didn't have at least 4 weeks of vacation.
Of course, I'm not an American.... but being neighbours, I didn't realize that our labour laws were actually *THAT* different in this regard (I knew about some differences, of course. but I didn't think they were different about vacation time).
Here in Canada, employees are entitled to a paid stat holiday, regardless of whether you are scheduled to work that day or not, if you have been employed for more than 30 days, and have worked at least 15 of the last 30 days. If you are not scheduled to work on a stat for which you will be paid, then you are entitled to an average day's pay for the stat, and if you work on that day, you are entitled to time and a half for the hours worked PLUS an average day's pay. There are 6 nation-wide stat holidays in Canada per year, and most provinces have their own stat holidays in addition to these, bringing the total to around 10 stat holidays per year for any employee.
Employees who have been with a company for more than one full year are also entitled to 10 additional paid time off days per year, although the employer has freedom to dictate when some or all of those days are, or to choose to offer the employee payment in lieu of those days. An employer is not obligated to pay an employee for unused vacation days unless the employer restricted the employee from taking a vacation. Some employers allow employees to accrue unused vacation days for several years, although this varies from employer to employer, and the law is neutral on this point. After 5 years with a company, the number of vacation days per year increases to 15. These are the legal minimums... employers are at their discretion to offer more if they choose.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Get an education and earn experiences that companies will value. If you are valued then you will be compensate monetarily as well as in perks like additional time off.
If you are not valued, then you'll be treated like a cog in the system and discarded as soon as a cheaper, younger cog is available.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In actual fact, high income earners tend to work substantially more than low income earners, so the fact that that they nominally more vacations hardly matters. People working around 60h/week make a median of $63000, whereas pepole working 40h/week make a median of $38000. A week or two of extra paid vacation isn't even a blip compared to 20h/week differences in work.
There are 52 weeks in a year. 10 days is two weeks. That is only 4%... the difference between making $100,000 a year and $104,000.
NO WAI, thanks for the insight.
Unionize!
I'm not trying to make any of you feel bad about your life choices, but I worked my entire adult life getting three months' vacation every year, plus a week for Spring Break and a week over the holidays.
As others here have said, you get paid what you're worth, I guess.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Higher salaried personnel also tend to work above the normal 80-hour biweekly standard on which their salary is based, so it's no surprise they also might get more vacation time to compensate.
10 days paid vacation?! In Sweden (and Im sure its pretty much the same in the other Nordic countries) weve had 15 days since 1951, and 25 days since 1978. Minimum. Ive got 35 days as a regular networking guy, and all overtime is paid, either in time (2 hours for every hour worked) or money, I get to choose
'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.
Not the exception. Who wrote this fucking article.
Here is Europe the legal minimum number of days of for anyone is 20 days. Plus national holidays.
I really can't understand how you can think 10 days is a lot. I get 9 days a year just as national holidays
You guys are screwed over!
Somebody had to do a survey to discover this?
Here we have close to 30 days by law.
Most people have 32 to 35 days.
I personally would not go below 90 days ... but that is not fully vacation, half of it is sports the majourity of the rest is studying new stuff, mostly project related.
The USA is a place completely out of question for working as a European (unless you want to do rocket science, work for Intel or Apple etc.)
I can not "relax" at a wok place, even if we would run on "low demand", and I should be present, I would always be kind of "high alert". Other people just sit at their workplace and are half asleep, nothing for me.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yeah this isn't exactly a big surprise when you give the topic a few seconds of thought. To incentivize employee retention, companies often raise paid vacation time. My previous employer raised paid vacation time to 3 weeks after 5 years, 4 weeks after 12 years, and 5 weeks after 18 years. During that time, pay increased at about 3% annually. So more senior employees get higher wages and increased paid vacation time. No big surprise there.
The problem for employees is that "paid vacation" is really something of a fraud. It's baked into your salary and you're just claiming the amount you're due when you request time off. Don't believe me? Try asking your boss for unpaid time off and see how far you'll get. "Paid vacation" is really just another shackle employers use to keep you on the job. But if workers can have an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) that's independent of employers, why couldn't they also have a vacation account that's also independent? I've been a dividend investor for nearly 10 years and my dividend income could, in theory, buy my vacation time (I say "in theory" because in practice, my employer limited vacation time to one's allotted paid vacation time. No unpaid vacation time!). When limited to 4 weeks' paid vacation and capable of buying 8 weeks of time, I began to see "paid vacation" for the bullshit it truly is. If paid vacations were eliminated, employees could invest money into their own vacation fund and have true paid vacations. The only flaw I see with this idea is that younger workers would only afford very very little vacation time and older workers would have a boatload of accrued vacation time.
The way I understand it, generally people with more seniority are paid more. They also have more vacation days.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
One of my past employers paid me a huge sum just to go away and never come back.
Unfortunately (for them) the state department of labor and industries still found me and I filled them in on the working conditions there.
Have gnu, will travel.
Fresh out of college and got into Govt Service as a Gazetted Officer (civilian equivalent of a Commissioned Officer, your name gets published in the Gazette, the official publication of Government of India). I got 30 days of "Earned Leave", and then 30 days of half pay medical leave, convertible to 15 days of full pay leave, 2 days of casual leave, 16 national holidays, two days of "restricted holidays". 65 days off! not counting 104 weekend.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wow. My company gives everyone the same 10 days off every year (typically things like MLK day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. +1 day of the employees choice). Plus employees get another day of vacation every pay period, so that is an additional 26 vacation days a year. Vacation rolls over from year to year. Plus employees get a 6 week sabbatical every 5 years. Right now I could take 3 months of paid vacation off if I wanted. But, I love my job and don't really have any incentive to take time off. I actually regret the weekend.
I didn't even know they celebrated MLK day in Europe! /s
If you were getting paid a max of 700 RUR a month, you'd obviously prefer the U.S. system, because even as a first-year employee at the lowest level, you'd be paid more than the most senior and experienced employee would for that job in the USSR.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Wow, will the generosity of US employers never end?
That teachers were in the top wage earners at over 80 paid days off a year ... ... ... by the hour, once you move to a salaried position vacation gets factored into that pay.
Oh wait
In all the tech companies I have interviewed for they offered 15 paid days a year minimum.
In the various retail jobs I worked at they had maybe 5
Mostly it comes down to, when you work by the hour, companies can pay you
I get a salary. traditionally the distinction between wages and salary work is that in salary work you are paid to get an ever evolving job done on time, and wages is by the hour not the deadline. THat's why salaried workers don't get overtime. While I do fill out a time card it's not how my performance is judged.
So technically, I have as much time off as I want as long as I meet expectations. But of course meeting expectations requires me to show up for work when everyone else is there too, so hours do matter.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Has nobody considered that the bottom 25% are likely part time or temporary workers?
So this "study" found that well-paid employees have better benefits than those at low-paying jobs? Mon Dieu! how can this be?
Next you "find" that 401K and pension plans are reserved for top earners, while minimum wage earners are left with no mechanism other than self-directed savings...
Thank you captain obvious, it never would have occurred to me that people with more valuable skills, people that demand higher salaries, get more vacation days than those without valuable skill and that receive lower wages.
Ken
I've always started a job with two weeks vacation and I['m neither in the top, nor bottom 25%.
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.]
That's why when people joke "Canada has two seasons, Winter and Summer." It isn't a joke, it's been 8 months of straight winter.
You clearly don't get it. The reason it's a joke is that really there is only one season. We had a _high_ of -11C the other day which is not bad given it's about the 109th January today.
"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."
Seriously? Your country is very broken.
I've just had to go look up my contract for my workplace, a place which is considered very harsh on time off, driving for results, after-hours working and getting every drop out of employees, even on weekends if they can convince people to come in.
Six weeks, guys. That's 30 working days.
Travel is cheap. Sublet your home for a month, pack light, and it's basically free.
Ha.
You really need to spend more time in your European businesses. I get 30 days holiday a year. Pretty much everyone I know gets at least 20, even gardeners, janitors/cleaners, drivers, etc.
I can only speak for UK and Italy, but I don't know a single working person who doesn't have time off and money enough to run a car, a house and travel. They may piss it away or not be able to find an affordable house near their workplace, but that's supply-and-demand given limited urban building, nothing to do with how much they earn.
The house-size has NOTHING to do with how much you earn... have you SEEN how expensive our houses are per square foot? Much more than anything in the US. That's because there's less of them and we don't have the luxury of space, in general. I couldn't afford a Central London apartment in a million years but neither could I afford one in New York.
I'd actually argue that if you live in a 10x10 room, you are equally to be wealthy, if you're in a city. There are single-room apartments going for nearly a million pounds ($1.4m) in areas of London that you will have heard of. But Greater London, 9 million people live there, and I have bought two houses in there at various points in my life.
I have a friend who paid STUPENDOUS amounts of money for a tiny apartment in Notting Hill. Five miles away, 3-bed houses are available to people on half his wage.
You even contradict yourself. If you depend on the government to pay for education, HEALTHCARE, etc. you're not wealthy. Not necessarily true. But that's because that's what our higher-taxes pay for. The rich AND the poor pay to provide healthcare to both. You can pay MORE to a private institution if you don't think the standard care is enough, but you can consume as much of the standard care as you need for as long as you need. Made bankrupt tomorrow? You still get all those expensive cancer drugs until the day you die.
I've never paid a penny for education, and I have a university degree. "College funds" are for the wealthy only, because nobody else needs them. Paying your way through university is basically "living alone for the first time", everything else is covered by a government loan that you basically NEVER pay back in any significant fashion but drip-feed back while you're earning money in later life. Oh, and if you are suddenly out of work or earning below a threshold for any reason... you don't have to make a single payment on it whatsoever.
I've never paid a penny for healthcare in my life, and I'm 38. Nor has ANYONE that I know. Because you don't need to pay for it when it's just given to you, unless you have something really seriously expensive that the NHS won't cover (which is almost nothing - 40 years of cancer care? Yep, free. You don't even need to fill out any paperwork) I pay my tax to pay for that, and collectively my fellow human beings pay for me too. Same way I don't pay "per crime committed against me" but fund a police force, a fire department, waste collection, etc.... collectively with my fellow human beings who also benefit from it. That's what tax is for. Otherwise the rich people would have their own private police forces, and the poor would live in anarchy.
I think you need to actually spend more time in Europe. Possibly over in Eastern Europe they might be poor, but that's doubtful. To be honest, the Polish etc. have a fabulous reputation for being hard-workers, sending money home and sustaining their families. Some of the Polish houses I've seen are extraordinary, built by ordinary people for their families. Countries in Western Europe may have rural areas (like any country has). You're just not comparing like-for-like.
But America is the only place I've been to where you can't exist without money.
P.S. "If *YOU'RE* dependent on government for educating your children *YOU'RE* not wealthy" - I rather be dependent on a government for educating my kids if they learn to spell properly along the way and get the ability to conduct some impartial empirical research on opinions they form in their life.
Honestly... you couldn't pay me enough to go live in the US compared to Europe. If wealth was our goal, maybe we'd be like the US. Thank fuck that it's not.
Jesus H Christ America! We may have shitty dental care but even our temps have about 20 days paid holiday.
So, PTO... nifty terminology. What is it with people insisting that everyone thinks they're some sort of a root vegetable? First you try to explain to me that you're a potato and then you refer to taking time off as something that's associated to PoTatOs? Just teasing, I actually think of PTO as being PTSD from being worked to the point of snapping. I would like to recommend GTC as a description of what you would send me e-mails about when I try to contact you and you've "Gone To the Can". Or maybe GBH for "Giving Boss Head" to let us know you're asking for a raise.
Of course the entire American culture is corrupted. I hear kids yelling "Momma, let's get these. There's a BOGO" in the grocery stores.
It really doesn't matter how absolutely stupid these things make people sound, they'll use those terms anyway.
Yep... so 5 weeks paid vacation a year here. And once a year, your employer has to pay you 10.2-12% of your entire previous year's salary with a major tax break instead of your normal salary to make sure you have money to travel and have fun. This is whether you're a burger flipper or a doctor or a billionaire. Everyone gets 5 weeks paid vacation.
Then there's 10 paid sick days by default.
Then there's 10 additional paid sick days in case you need to stay home with your kids.
Then there's Christmas week, Easter week, lots and lots of long weekends.
Altogether, it's nearly 20% of the year you're paid to not work... as a rule in Norway.
I haven't come close to using all my days except for a year when I had the worst boss EVER.
For all of those who have read this. I want you to know that because of the way you treat your poor, while not official, it has become common in Europe to refer to the U.S. as a third world country. Only a third world country would exploit their weak instead of developing them into real assets. Only a third word country would punish their people for getting sick instead of investing in making them well and able to contribute again.
BTW... I am an American, I just left before I was old enough to see how bad it really is. And I have traveled to far less developed countries than the U.S. and they would never let their people live the way America does... and even worse, only a third world country would elect a casino owner as their leader.
Duh.
You're welcome.
Did we really need a study for this insight?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
List of minimum annual leave by country (wikipedia)
Here in Europe most workers get 20-25 days of paid vacation per year, as mandated by each countries' law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
Come to Brazil: my salary is bigger than 80% of the people in this country (considered a Medium salary here, since I am not rich). But, I get 30 days of paid vacation days per year, PLUS 33% of my salary as a bonus to go on vacation. I usually split my vacation into two waves of 15 days per year. Cheers!