Blue-collar workers are screwed, though.
In my youth I worked for a place that advertised 15 days very proudly as meaning two weeks salaried vacation plus a personal day (usually Friday after thanksgiving). After all if you're salaries at a 24x7 operational company, if you want a Saturday off with guaranteed no phone calls, you need to take vacation.
And people put up with this?
That depends on how it's counted, it may be counted the way you are but it also might not be. For instance, the standard holidays that you list do not come out of my PTO pool, which is the number of days that I was told it was when I was hired. The result being I have those days plus those five, plus the day after Thanksgiving, as time off, I just don't get to pick when those last six days are used.
also, why should good living standards only apply to those with "elite jobs?" it's a rich country.
San Francisco is not like Indianapolis, which is not like Fargo.
Funny that the waiting list to immigrate to the US can be decades long. I guess those people are just too stupid to know how bad it is in the US?
Also, I immigrated to the US from one of those other rich countries and I think quality of life is better in the US (but it's all a personal preference).
I made the claim that the U.S. is not as nice a place to live as many other rich countries. Objectively speaking this is a true statement. The U.S. ranks lower on many measurements of living standards. Of course there are counterexamples in that some people have a better standard of living in the U.S. than they did in another country but we need to be mindful that the plural of anecdote is not data.
However I also experienced more freedom and diversity and was able to find a much more heterogenous community, as well as do things that were simply not allowed in my home country.
My life is much richer here and so the US is much nicer for me to live in.
US marketing is the best in the world, no doubt; maybe "mistaken" or "deceived" is more accurate than "stupid".
A few observations:
- people trying to immigrate to the USA come predominantly from desperately poor countries that are, indeed, not as nice a place to live. (People from those countries are also frequently denied tourist visa to the USA, btw.)
- among my fellow students at a good university in California that came from first world countries, only about a quarter decided to stay for longer than a few years.
- among Chinese that go to study in the USA, increasing numbers apparently choose to return to China.
> it's all a personal preference
To a large part it is.
Among expats that have options and have seen different continents, the US is more of middling choice, I'd think, but for some people it just clicks and they love it. (And NY is in a different category, anyway.)
If you think about companies as "us versus them", where "us" is workers and "them" is giant faceless monolithic corporations, then your idea that enforcing worker protections is a high priority might make sense.
But most companies are small. I run a software company ... I am just a guy trying to get by, who now in addition to the normal-person's burden of making my life go, has to also make a company go, and that company provides jobs for 10-12 people.
If you make my situation much harder than it is, the company would cease to exist or would downscale to 2-4 people, shedding the majority of the jobs. I am not a faceless corporation, I am just a guy who wants to get interesting things built. My little company is certainly not set up to "exploit workers", especially not on an industrial scale.
Now, paraxoically, if you add a lot more friction to what needs to happen to run a business (regulation around hiring, firing, invoicing, etc), then people like me drop out, and then what you mostly have left is the larger companies who do want to exploit workers because that is just kind of how larger companies work. Plus then you lose all the innovation / energy / economic activity that comes from smaller companies. It maybe seems like not the best idea. (If it is, how come Silicon Valley is not in France?)
As an investor, I fund a small French company and I have seen some of the crap they have to deal with just because they have a handful of employees. It makes me very glad I don't live in France.
Go to reddit/r/personalfinance and you'll read lots of stories of people in shit jobs being taken advantage of by their employer. A society that allows people without money/education to be exploited is not a good one. In the U.S., from my perspective, we have a "I've got mine, fuck you" society. I'm not exploited at my job and I have a very comfortable existence. However, many of my fellow countrymen are not so fortunate.
Also, those restrictions on firing may be giving you a lot more potential employees. Changing jobs is a risk and if you were able to fire them after a week then that would be a major financial setback for them.
But this doesn't seem to be nearly enough to tip the balance in terms of operating a business overall ... I consistently hear from people how much it sucks to operate a small business in Europe. I don't see what's wrong in principle with having worker protections kick in at a certain company size, but that doesn't seem to be popular.
Of course, if your business is in maple syrup or something else with heavy government intervention, then your experience will likely be quite different. :)
Wtf lol. America isn't necessarily like this. You just had a shit job.