What has been poorly understood is that substantial pauses are
excellent in terms of restoring productivity and way more important
it severs the buildup of daily connections with coworkers that drain
time and critical focus. What is more, the rest learn to operate
independently from your presence. All this can only help
productivity.
A global regime for workers applied everywhere is obviously a best
choice and the chart below tells us that we are closer to that than
we think. It likely reflects a best choice solution also.
The USA has continued to operate outside the apparent norm and likely
this policy needs to be both rethought and also applied to China and
India and elsewhere. It is noteworthy that Germany made a virtue of
the imposed labor rules after WWII and the unintended consequence was
that it worked out to the benefit of the employers.
The bottom line is that common labor laws work well if they are
universal. Some will attempt to game them to their own cost or the
cost of an unnecessary middleman.
Why Europe's Laws
On Vacations Are Better Than Your Wildest Dreams (and How Badly
Americans Get Screwed)
We work ourselves to
death, while people in other countries take holidays, get family
leave and have paid sick time during vacations.
July
4, 2012
Imagine
this: You work 25 hours a week at the McDonald’s in Cairo, New
York, and have finally earned two
weeks of paid vacation. You set out on a bike trip.
On the first day in the saddle, you hit a pothole and crash, cracking
your collar bone. You sit on your couch for the rest of your vacation
watching the Tour de France. Tough luck.
Unless
you worked for McDonald’s in Europe. If you did, you would be
entitled to a fully paid do-over, according to a June 21ruling
of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the
highest court in Europe (whose rulings must be followed by all member
states). This court ruled that all European workers are entitled to
their full vacation after they have healed:
“A worker who becomes unfit during his paid annual leave, is
entitled at a later point to a period of leave of the same duration
as that of his sick leave.”
This
means that European workers can take their paid sick leave during
their paid vacations, and take their vacations all over again, and
guess what? American corporations who do business in Europe, like
McDonalds, have to pay for it!
And
the comparisons between American and European workplaces get worse:
Not only do American corporations with operations in Europe have to
provide their workers with paid sick leave during worker vacations,
but also, by law they have to provide paid
vacations in the first place, which in most countries amounts to a
month or more.
In
the U.S. there is no legal obligation at all. If
you get a paid vacation it’s either because the company “gave”
it to you or because you achieved it through collective bargaining.
Here’s a table comparing
developed nations by statutory minimum annual leave and paid public
holidays. Read ‘em and weep.
###
What
about paid medicalleave?
Fuggetaboutit.
We don’t have any laws that mandate paid leave for pregnancy,
sickness, or care of sick family members. When it comes to paid
maternity leave, the U.S. is one of four countries, out of
173 studied,
that fails to provide paid maternity leave. The other three are
Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. (I guess with all our money
going to Wall Street, we can’t afford it.)
Wait,
wait, This just in: We do have the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA)
which provides us with the legal right to request unpaid medical
leave. Well not quite. You have to work at an employer with 50 or
more employees or work in the public sector, and you have to have to
meet certain conditions to be eligible. The net result, according to
the U.S.
Department of Labor, is that
only “slightly more than half (54.9 percent) of U.S. workers (and
46.5 percent of private sector workers) also meet the FMLA's length
of service and hours related eligibility requirements.”
So
if you work at McDonalds in Vienna, Austria, by law you get a full
month off (22 work days) in your first year
plus 13 paid public holidays for a total of 35 days. And after six
years of flipping burgers you get 36 days of paid vacation plus 13
paid public holidays for a total of 49 paid vacation and public
holidays – that’s more than two months off, paid! (That’s in
addition to your paid sick leave, maternity and paternity paid leave,
and paid leave to care for a sick relative.) And you’re covered
whether you’re a full-time manager or a part-time employee.
In
upstate New York, McDonalds “gives” you two weeks paid vacation
after one year of service provided you work a minimum of 20 hours a
week for one year. (Your vacation pay is “based
on the average weekly hours worked, multiplied by your rate of pay.”)
Same company, same product, but our lack of legal protections show
clearly that in our countries Corporate America is at the helm. (Can
you imagine what a McDonalds would say if you asked to start your
vacation again because you became ill just after you began it?)
Economists call our lack of legal protections “labor market
flexibility,” as if it were a good thing. Sicko.
Overall,
the picture
in the U.S is even bleaker. In
Europe all workers, both part-time and
full-time, are entitled by law to the same paid vacations. However,
in the U.S., only 36 percent of part-time workers are “given” any
paid vacation at all, and only 37 percent receive any paid holidays.
So when you combine full-time and part-time workers in America, on
average we receive only nine days of paid annual leave (vacation/sick
days) and six paid holidays. That’s downright pathetic.
But
wait, isn’t all that extra vacation wrecking Europe?
That
certainly is a widely held view among conservative elites (who, of
course, have plenty of paid vacation and sick leave of their own).
They tell us that Greece’s downfall is the result of too much time
off to drink and be merry. AsTime magazine reports:
Last fall, the chairman of the China's sovereign wealth fund, Jin
Liqun, tied Europe's economic troubles to its "sloth-inducing,
indolence-inducing labor laws." Earlier this year, Mitt Romney
warned that European-style benefits would "poison the very
spirit of America." And British-born Harvard historian Niall
Ferguson has written that in contrast to Americans' Protestant work
ethic, Europeans have an "atheist sloth ethic."
Even
Angela Merkel, the German prime minister said, "We cannot have a
currency (the euro) with one person getting lots of holiday and
another person very little.”
Unfortunately,
these illustrious personages are letting their conservative
ideologies blind them to the basic facts: Germans have much more paid
time off than do the Greeks and their economy is doing much better
than ours – as well as the rest of Europe’s. According to a
2011 Eurofound
study, “coupled with public holidays, the average
German has 40 days of holiday a year -- still tied with the Danes for
the most in Europe. Greeks and Portuguese by comparison each average
33 days vacation a year, including public holidays.”
Furthermore, Time reports
that “there's the growing body of research showing that time off
can actually help workers get more done. A 2009 study in Harvard
Business Review, for example, showed that requiring business
consultants to take time off every week actually boosted their
productivity." Similarly, a study by Ernst
& Young “showed that the longer the
vacation their employees took, the better they performed.”
So
why do American companies provide so many vacations days in Europe
and so little in the U.S.?
Because
they have to. It’s the law of the land in Europe and if American
companies want to do business there they have to play by those rules.
But where did those rules come from?
The
story starts after WWII when the United States wanted to make sure
Europe wouldn’t slip into the Communist orbit. At the same time we
also wanted to remodel Germany so that it would not rise again to
cause another world war. The solution was two-fold. First, using the
money and muscle, we “encouraged” the empowerment of
non-Communist unions all over Western Europe. Imagine that! The U.S.
made sure that unions would flourish (as long as they weren’t
friendly to the Soviets). In addition, in Germany, we encouraged
“co-determination” which meant democratizing corporations by
putting worker representatives on the corporate boards of directors.
The unstated purpose, at first, was to make it less likely that the
giant German steel and coal conglomerates would ever again become the
bedrock of a fascist state.
By
the mid-1970s, it became clear that the policies were good both for
business and for working people so the idea spread throughout Europe.
Also, government policies encouraged “works councils” that
brought together labor and management from the shop floor to the
corporate level. The overall result of empowering unions in Europe
was the establishment of national legislation in support of paid
vacations, paid sick leave, paid maternity and paternity leave and
many other pro-worker policies.
Meanwhile
back in the USA, we headed in the opposite direction. Rather than
empowering unions, as a matter of policy we crushed them, a process
that has accelerated since President Reagan broke the air traffic
controllers' strike. Through a variety of court rulings it became
more and more difficult to organize new workers. The laws that did
exist were so weak that management could easily fire workers who
engaged in union organizing activities even though it is a legally
protected right. When unions pressed for legislation to stop union
busting, and to plug porous labor laws, they got nowhere in Congress,
no matter which party was in power. So while unions became more
stable in Europe, union density in the U.S. dropped from a high of 35
percent in the private sector in 1955, to less than 7 percent today.
That, my friends, is why Corporate America is making suckers out of
us. We don’t have the muscle to take them on.
Here’s
a graph that shows why our muscles have atrophied. As unions decline,
so does our middle-class way of life:
##
Clearly,
corporations have more than enough money to provide us with the same
vacation plans as they do workers in Europe. But they would rather
“let the market decide” – which is French for setting up and
taking advantage of a downward spiral in wages and benefits. It’s
not a coincidence that defined pension funds in the U.S. are becoming
extinct (but not so in Europe). It’s not a coincidence that
median family wages are declining. It’s not a coincidence that
public and private sector workers are being pitted against each other
as the downward spiral accelerates. It’s not a coincidence that
working people in this country are being asked to sacrifice in order
to pay for the damage that financial elites have done to our economy.
In
Europe workers are not fighting each other. Rather they are standing
in the way of any and all efforts aimed at eliminating their
cherished benefits – benefits that go to union and non-union
members alike. Even the austerity-minded German political leadership
dare not touch those cherished vacations.
So
next time you get some time off, think about what it might be like to
have paid maternity and paternity leave or have a couple of months
vacation at full pay (and, of course, full protection against illness
while on vacation) ... and then maybe think about how we might join
together to fight for these very basic human rights that nearly the
entire human race, except us, enjoys.
1 comment:
Please correct me if I'm wrong. We are still primarily a Capitalist society and Europe by and large is a Socialist society. As such, the respective governments will undoubtedly pass laws favoring the underpinnings of their societies.
The undeclared war going on in the US right now is capitalism v. socialism.
Who will win? It doesn't matter they both want absolute control over the masses.
Would you like your health care jammed down your throat or presented in a manner reflective of a free-market economy?
What the article fails to present are some of the more egalitarian laws also enjoyed by our European employee counterparts; In Germany the work week is only 35 hours. In France an employer has a very difficult time when they want to fire an employee. In Holland the CEO of a company can not make more than 30x the salary of the lowest paid employee. These are 3 examples of the inherent differences of a Socialist Europe when compared to a Capitalist USA.
While both systems have shortcomings, I think it prudent to observe that Americans still have the opportunity to ascend economic boundaries whereas Europeans are primarily marketing their products and services to us for similar reasons.
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