What unlimited means is "as long as your manager is decent, you will maybe get your days off" vs accrued vacation where you may be forced to take vacation to not lose it.

I don't look at it that way. If you have accrued vacation, you "earned" your vacation and they can't take it away from you without compensation. Thus, you are guaranteed your days off. If they fire you, they should even have to pay you your salary for those vacation days.

"Unlimited" vacation just gives all the control to your employer: the right to deny you vacation, the right to dictate how long your vacation is, etc.

This is indeed the law in Israel. What happens is that people are allowed to accrue a number of vacation days up to a limit, typically however many days of vacation you earn in a year, times two. Then the company forces you to take, at the end of the year, a number of vacation days down to the limit.

Companies where this limit wasn't put in place introduced a moral hazard, whereby people would wink-and-handshake with their superiors when they would take a reasonable amount of vacation without actually reporting the vacation days to HR, wherein HR didn't really have the means to detect and enforce against the fraud. Thus people would work for decades, retire, and take compensation for decades of "untaken" vacation days, on top of the normal retirement packages. These policies represented usually $1+ million in obligation per worker and thus were clearly unsustainable without some kind of enforceable limit.

This is required in the US. That's the point of unlimited vacation - since it doesn't accrue, the company doesn't have to pay it out when you leave.

This is the law in California but not most other states.

In most states, vacation time is a benefit that can expire, evaporate, or be rescinded. The company is just deciding not to assign you job duties during your time off. How generous of them! But it's totally their right to decide not to do that, or to put a bunch of boxes around how they will do that. So it's legal, and common, that unused vacation time will actually be lost.

In CA, accrued vacation time is classified as "deferred compensation." It is legally money that is owed to you. It will be paid at a later date, but it must be paid.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the "unlimited vacation" fad started in tech companies with a large chunk of their workforce in California.

Someone I know who retired from a fairly senior position at Netflix rather liked it and took some fairly long vacations but said there really was a good tradition of umplugging at least as he observed that came from the top.

https://namely.com/blog/minimum-pto-what-is-it-why-you-shoul...

They don't do that for normal PTO but it's certainly feasible.

Pretty much no one (outside of maybe something regulated who may mandate two week PTOs for security purposes) is going to do that every time an employee takes PTO. In any case, if I really want to do work I don't even need access to my employer's computers.

Getting sick was jokingly referred to as a firing offense, though people did take sick leave. Burnout was a real thing – and I barely lasted a year, though that may well have been unrelated.

I could easily see a requirement from high up managment to “reduce risk” by having a department have a plan for an unusually long holiday stint (I.e someone taking 6 weeks off in a row), fundamentally because senior management don’t trust middle management.

At the job before that I had accrued 6 weeks of PTO, which was the max. I took every other Friday off after that and was paid out a month and a half when I left the company. Everyone understood the situation, so it wasn’t looked down upon when I was gone every other week.

My perspective was that unlimited PTO was a scam to reduce vacation time. Most people are not going to take advantage of it, so the company benefits.

There's a new law still in committee:

https://www.scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=4226...

> What? Why is it called vacation then

Having more than two weeks off in a year is pretty strange. I worked at a place with "unlimited vacation" once, and you weren't allowed to take off more than two weeks at a time until someone took off two weeks every three weeks ... and that ended that policy. They made it about 4 months before getting fired though.

I mean, not that strange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

Americans are very, very strange and the fact they think they're normal is part of that.

Shall we lobby our representatives? This does happen at the state level, and accordingly many states have more pro-worker policies and laws. But change at the federal level is a substantially harder thing to bring.

At the federal level, no major presidential candidate supports EU-style worker protections and mandatory benefits. And not enough congressional candidates support it, not even remotely enough to change anything. In fact, the vast majority are outright hostile to worker rights due to lobbying/capture by corporate interests.

At the state level, there is lots of variance, but even in the states most friendly to workers, it's not remotely possible to reach Europe's level of benefits around vacation, sick leave, maternity leave, let alone the right to organize for these things. There is no political will, and any political candidate who actually has the will could never win a statewide election.

All in all the US has been a success story. Whether there's correlation or causation between that and some of the regulatory and legal environment is hard to say. Maybe it's success is primarily due to resources and geography and maybe the US would be even more successful with a more European style system.

Speaking only for myself, I've found that when I joined a company whose time-off policies I didn't like (only one so far), I just asked for more time off as part of the deal. The response I got was "sure. It's easier for us to give you more paid time off than more money."

Given the current political system(s) in the US, this is practically impossible at the federal level; difficult at the state level; somewhat more possible at the city level (eg New York City's Working Families Party). Third parties exist but generally have almost no influence.

Ummmmmm, Yes?

It's how the people who got ALL the rights we take for grated today did.

Especially our employment rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs

Probably other US organizations (universities?) also have fairly good vacation policies.

I think what's different about the US is that the country and states tend to not mandate this stuff. This does lead to people getting exploited under certain situations where the employer has more power in the relationship. I think the US is wrong on this but seems to work for them?

Make that five weeks for France plus up to 11 days of public holidays. That's a minimum too, we have a whole bunch of additional stuff that can stack on top of that, so many I can't even make a complete list from memory.

We're not better or worse, we're just different. Deal with it or leave us be.

Unlimited paid vacation is simply not a thing that is offered by any company anywhere in the world.

Doesn't that depend on the state?

The EU approach is sort of the same, but to add regulation on top to steer the market towards specific goals, like having a strong middle class. If, for example, a company doesn't suffer from being nasty to their employees (e.g. because they're a monopolist), regulation will be put in place to create that dynamic. I personally find this approach more feasible, but regulation can be worked around and sometimes backfire, it's not easy to get right.

Back to your point: It comes down to how much you get paid. If you work full time and can't afford vacation or sickness, is that OK?

If you think that's OK, we just disagree I suppose. There's a power imbalance between employers and employees that favours the employers. They have more money, expertise, legal counsel, negotiation power etc. Given the chance, they will pay as little as they can for labour, crush competition etc. I don't believe that's good for a country in the long run.

If you think it's not OK, something has to happen. Paying people more so they can save up money to deal with this is one approach. Assuming the risk of them not working (with paid vacation and sick days) is another one. In the EU, we tend to go down the latter route. I guess you could see it as patronising, but there is beauty in sharing and distributing personal risks. I'm personally fine with both solutions. I'm running a consultancy right now, so I've decided to take the first route, assume and manage my own risks.

Historically, that stuff was put in place for factory workers in the industrial revolution I presume, though I'm very fuzzy on that. I'd argue good living conditions for low level workers help create a strong middle class through upward social mobility, but that's going off on a tangent perhaps.

A company having a monopoly in the regular market doesn't really matter for employment: if you're terrible to your employees, it's not your customers you have to fear, it's the employees. They will leave and no new ones will join and you won't be doing any business if you don't have any employees to actually do the work you'll get paid for.

> I guess you could see it as patronising, but there is beauty in sharing and distributing personal risks.

But that's quite literally what insurance is made for. The only difference is that insurance adds some amount of accountability.

Depends on the situation I suppose. If there's only one bakery corporation in your country and you're a baker, you can either work there, learn a new job or leave the country. It's a bit orthogonal for sure, but competition for talent is vital for good conditions for workers. Plus, a monopoly doesn't have to provide a good product or service, they just use their power to stifle competition. Suddenly their need for competent staff is greatly reduced.

> But that's quite literally what insurance is made for. The only difference is that insurance adds some amount of accountability

In my book, insurance is for unlikely, expensive events. In Germany for example, if an employee is sick for more than six weeks, the company no longer pays their salary, the health insurance takes over. It's likely that an employee is sick for a couple of days, not a case for insurance. Just how it's likely that an employee will want some vacation, also not a case for insurance.

I could however picture a system where companies only pay for the work employees actually do, and the funding for paid time off and sick days comes from some other source. Sounds intriguing. I believe everybody should be able to take some time off work for leisure and sickness, I see that as a human right. How exactly that's achieved, I'm personally very flexible there.

That's socialism. Look at what happened to the USSR and it's obvious that we don't want to go (further) down that path.

The cost of living is too high in many places; but that's a symptom and not a cause.

- Do you choose your water company?

- How about your power company?

- TV?

- Internet? and can it be different than your TV?

- Cell?

There are probably more that I have forgotten to mention. But, at least where I live, there is a choice for every one of those items. And hey, there's also no Comcast here.

> FMLA applies to all public agencies, all public and private elementary and secondary schools, and companies with 50 or more employees.

Source: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/benefits-leave/fmla

This is nonsense in general. I've taken month-long vacations and never had to do anything special so long as I had the time and, obviously, told my manager.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nq2ph2/i_r...

I assume if you took the UK legal minimum of 5.6 weeks for example, you would get fired.

It isn't if they are meek or mid.

In general: it's good to let your employer know that you value your time. If you don't suck, they'll respect you more, not less.

To have it really unlimited you need a special position, like be a relative of CEO. But in that case you can have the same even with limited vacation policy.