This doesn’t include unpaid leave like holidays, to be clear.
How’s your country doing with PTO? I’m originally from the states, so everyone knows how that’s going.
What’s up with this chart?
At the top it says it’s “Based on the number of legally mandated paid vacation days and public holidays each year.” Then at the bottom left there is a note that says “The U.S. is the only OECD country without federally mandated paid leave.”
Which is correct. In the U.S. your employer doesn’t have to give you a single paid day off. No holidays, no vacation, no sick, no maternity/paternity, nothing. Every single minute paid while not at work is completely at the discretion of the employer.
So why is the U.S. listed as 10 and not 0?
I’m not sure, I was wondering the same thing specifically about the US number. I had an idea that since country laws, states, provinces are so different, they were taking averages to get these numbers.
The report says they "reviewed the annual statutory paid leave and paid public holidays laws in 197 countries, referring to government websites, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, etc. We then ranked the countries based on the combined number of statutory paid leave days and paid public holidays per year.
Paid leave refers to the statutory minimum annual time off bookable by the individual. Vacation days refer to the combined total of paid leave days and paid public holidays."
This site shows the laws by state.
I don’t see any that mandate vacation or government holidays, just sick leave. Although some states just mandate PTO, with no type requirements, there is nothing about requiring them to allow employees to schedule vacation time, which allows for employers to only allow it to be used for sick leave.
22 states and D.C. have no laws requiring leave. Of the 28 states that do, many of them are almost nothing, like 5 days of jury duty in Alabama, and 1 day (lol) of jury duty in Louisiana (to be fair, one day is probably the average amount of time it takes a Louisiana jury to put a black man in prison for life). Or Georgia that doesn’t require PTO, but if an employer does provide it they must allow it to be used to care for a family member. There are several other examples of next to nothing that I won’t list, but a quick scan says 15 of those 28 states are nearly worthless IMO.
Many of the states that mandate sick leave are around 5-7 days or less, and some of them have exceptions and /or caps on the amount the employers have to spend for smaller businesses.
Even the more generous (and to be fair, largest population) states don’t get to 10 days just from sick leave, they need parental leave to get there. But they have reduced rates and caps on the total payments. In California, for example, with their caps the amount paid over the 8 week requirement would only amount to a couple weeks of what I made before I retired. And parental leave isn’t an every year thing, most people only do it a couple times in their lives (and much less recently.)
I didn’t do the math, maybe they did and the average somehow gets to about 10 days. But I’m leaning towards a mistake.
Caveat: I admit I didn’t read everything very closely, so I may have missed a generous state or made a mistake somewhere.
Edit: I don’t want people not from here to get the wrong idea. We’re not all in this situation, not even close. Any decent job is giving all the federal, and maybe a couple extra state, holidays off, or paying you extra to come in if they’re open on holidays, and giving 3-6 weeks PTO, and probably some extras like parental leave and bereavement leave. But for employers that consider their employees to be disposable, these minimums are the reality.
Great rundown, thanks for the link too.
I know federal employees get some paid holidays like new year, so maybe the “10” score is reporting best-case scenario federal employee pto benefits rather than the lack of PTO benefits for the wider US population.
Federal employees get:
11 federal holidays.
13 days of sick leave with no cap on accrual.
13 days of vacation leave for the first 3 years, 20 days of vacation for the next 12 years, and 26 days of vacation after 15 years, with a maximum accrual of 240 hours, if you go over that you need to use it by the end of the year or you lose everything over 240 hours, although there are valid reasons to challenge this and be allowed to go over 240.
So a total of 50 days after 15 years tenure, not bad. There are a lot of federal employees, that probably raises the average a lot, state and municipal employees usually get a good amount too. Maybe a 10 day average isn’t as far off as I thought. Still not required by law for all employers though. At the end of the day the government is just another employer that chooses to provide this, even if the PTO is a law because everything regarding federal employees does come from Congress.
Edit: I forgot federal employees got paid parental leave starting in 2020. It provides an additional 12 weeks (you don’t have to use other accrued leave like many state’s parental leave laws) to be taken within 12 months after a qualifying birth or adoption placement. So an additional 120 days for having two kids during a career would bump the average a bit.
okay, that’s still a small amount of the population, but that must have been added to the total to raise the average few pto days for civilians up a bit.
Us military servicemembers, another million-plus people, have a lot of paid time off also, so they must be adding in the anomalous best case scenarios to average out a higher score for the U.S.
In Chile is 15, not 20 (we are a proper third world country punches the table)
Traditional “third world countries” have plenty of PTO.
Where do you think the chart got the extra five days from? Is there a holiday that should be pto but isn’t?
Just an error on the map. There are some holidays but those are omitted on the whole map.
Also, what “traditional third world country” even means 😅
Third world is an outdated term to describe countries that didn’t take part in the cold war, it doesn’t mean “undeveloped country” or the like, so I try to avoid using it that way.
I know, my focus was on the “traditional” part of it 😄
oh, most people still incorrectly use “third world” to mean undeveloped or economically disadvantaged, so for me that’s the “traditional” sense of the word while I try to update colloquial usage.
Hey, my last two employers had unlimited time off! I could take as many days as I wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with production schedules, which it always did. When I asked for paternity leave, I was told “I was back at work the next day, because it isn’t like you’re doing anything!”, and that “My wife went blueberry picking the day after our first kid was born!”
unpaid time off is very popular with enployers!
sorry about the lack of paternity leave, that’s rough.
Today I learned that paid days of leave does not correlate with good living conditions.
there’s a lot of correlation between high living standards and PTO, and there are a few anomalies, rather than a complete lack of correlation I mean.
unpaid leave like holidays
Sounds like a US thing.
not so exclusive, lots of countries have holidays where people don’t have to come into work and also don’t get paid, though the US is probably the most strict.
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So you get two paychecks, one from your work and one from the military?
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if I’m understanding you, someone personally paying money to be off work is unpaid time off, not pto.
How long is the term of military service before a Russian soldier is paid? Career military must get some sort of salary.
I’m just cracking jokes.
ha dang, I thought I was getting some new info, i was wondering about the sign up bonuses and everything.
I’m suggesting that they wont ever pay you because they will kill you, which isn’t far from the truth.
i get your joke, but since Russian servicemembers are salaried, there’s no pto and many of their service members are not killed by Russia, it’s pretty far from the truth.
