European Vacation Benefits

Friday, December 7th, 2007 | European Union |

Europeans get quite a bit more vacation time than Americans. I never considered that might be because of the effects of taxation. Via The Corner:

The problem, employers and economists believe, has a lot to do with the 63 percent marginal tax rate paid by top earners in Denmark - a level that hits anyone making more than 360,000 Danish kroner, or about $70,000…

…[T]he high taxes, mixed with his wife’s discomfort in Denmark, meant that a job offer in Qatar three years ago was all it took to pry [Thomas Sorensen] away from Copenhagen. Now, he is ensconced in Frankfurt, setting up a new business on the side and planning to pay no more than 25 percent of his income to the German state.

“When you are at 63 percent tax, you don’t look forward to the evaluation with the boss to get a raise,” Sorensen said. “You look for more vacation or a training course in the tropics - something that you get the full benefit of.”

So if you’re a Dane making the $70,000 figure, a 5% raise would be $3,500, but after taxes you’d only realize an extra $1,295, which amounts to a 1.8% raise. With that pitiful amount for a raise extra vacation time is much more attractive.

Wikipedia’s vacation entry lists minimum vacation times for countries around the world.

As a BTW, I’d prefer mandatory minimum personal days (to be used as sick days or vacation days at the worker’s discretion) to a minimum wage. Unlike a Federal minimum wage, personal days are automatically indexed to the local economy and the worker’s labor value.

I view personal days the way I view lunch breaks - as something necessary to a healthy and sustainable work environment. If you can’t take a day off when you’re sick you’re less likely to be healthy and more likely to fall behind financially. I say that as someone who never had a job with vacation benefits until I was in my late twenties. Having paid sick days and a little discretionary time off made a huge difference in my outlook on life and work.

Ten or so personal days a year would probably be about right as a minimum. According to the Wikipedia link 25% of U.S. workers receive no vacation days at all. The average number of vacation days for all U.S. workers is only 10, so that would bump up our numbers quite a bit considering all of the people who have more vacation days and sick days that that.

4 Comments to European Vacation Benefits

Chris Byrne
December 8, 2007

Small business owner here. Every day I take off work costs me $600.

Where I’m contracting, the full time employees at my level get 20 days a year plus one day for every year of service, plus 16 work holidays, 4 floating personal days, up to 30 days fully paid sick days per year, and up to 180 days half pay sick leave.

The last real vacation I took was 5 days, in 2003.

Before that, it was 10 days in 1997.

Les Jones
December 8, 2007

The 10 days I’m proposing would be personal days, to be used as sick days, vacation days, etc.

You’re relatively young, a few years younger than me as I recall. As people get older their health suffers and they need those sick days. And for women having kids there’s a need for those days. That’s why decent jobs provide sick days and vacation days.

Like I say, I’d rather see minimum personal days than a Federal minimum wage.

Les Jones
December 9, 2007

After a night’s sleep, here’s a clarification I was getting at above. Personal days and sick days don’t necessarily mean suntanning on the beach with a pina colada.

You’ve got doctor’s visits, hospital stays, parent-teacher conferences, your kids school play or track event, traffic court and family court, and a million other things. Being able to take off of work for those things without losing your job strikes me as basic a right as lunch breaks.

GunGeek
December 12, 2007

I’m at my third employer that lumps both sick and vacation days into the same pool. Bad idea. Now when someone is sick, they scarf down whatever drugs they need to get them through the day and go to work anyway. No point in burning up a perfectly good vacation day just because you’re sick, after all.

I’ve seen one guy work for an hour and then take a nap for a half hour then repeat the cycle until he’d worked his 8 hours. Another one got so much worse during the day that we had to give him a ride home. Sickness would spread through these places like some refugee camp.

People need sick time that is not tied into vacation time. I’m working at a hospital right now and we don’t have normal time off. Since so much of their staff has to work on holidays, hospitals traditionally give more days off, but no holiday time. It’s great in that you can work on minor holidays if you’d rather take a different day off, but they also give no normal sick time, either. Sure, we have short term disability that kicks in if you’re out long enough, but it’s hard to find someone taking a day off if they’re sick. You’d think a hospital would have the common sense to encourage sick people to stay home.