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Dachshie gets upset when Mom almost gives away hiding spot! 😄 Follow me for more funny dog siblings!

presidential alert a red panda was just born at the chattanooga zoo

catchymemes

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Pup loves her wheel! 🐶 Follow me for more tiny puppies!

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Little puppy taking charge! 🐴 Follow me for more working dogs!

tkthegoddess

😆💋

spriggan675

I think adults need summer vacation. Like let's just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I'm so tired.

spriggan675

Love to see this post getting notes again. None of us are ok.

orteil42

i may just be french but do americans really not get paid summer vacations? you don't go to the beach with your kids? "There is no federal or state statutory minimum paid vacation or paid public holidays" am i reading this right? like i'm not trying to rub anyone's face in it but you're just stuck in the rat race year-round until you're old and that's normal and accepted??? in the 21st century???

coffee-and-manslaughter

I can't fucking believe we live like this

jv

That map is kind of misleading. At least in the case of Spain, but I suspect mostly everywhere else too: you see, here you get 22 mandatory vacation days, yeah, but those are just the ones you get to choose the dates for. Then, you have another 14 days per year of mandatory public holidays. So the minimum number of paid off days is 36 per year, not 22.

If I'm not wrong, the US is the only country in the world with no legally mandated public holidays.

jv

Honestly, I wouldn't blame it on Calvinism / Puritan ethics, because well, you know, they literally invented that in northern Europe and now they have pretty strong labor rights over there. Hell, "John" (Jean) Calvin was FRENCH and you know, the frenchies have it better than anyone else.

I would blame it (out of a hunch, I haven't read or done any actual research on the matter) more on the extreme anti-leftist, anti-union stance of the US during the Cold War. I think most of the countries encoded the minimum rest days into their labor laws after the WWII and they have been expanding them ever since then. But for the US that was too close to commies and just went the other way. See, there's a reason the US is the only country in the world that celebrates labor day in a different date than May the 1st.

I just did a google search to see the history of my own country: It looks Spain encoded as law that public servants would have 15 days off per year in the early 1800s, then the Second Republic government introduced a 7 days mandatory paid leave for everyone in 1931, which was derogated by the fascist government after they won the civil war in 1939, and there wasn't any legal minimum until the 1960s, when the same fascist gov introduced a 15 days leave in the new labor law. And then, once the fascist government fell, the new democratic gov increased it to the current 22 days.

So the big switch here started happening in the 60s. It's pretty telling that by then, the US was more anti-labor than an actual fascist country.

Henceforth, don't blame it on the puritans, blame it on the John Birch Society.

rainbowsandchocolate

Going away from javi's point again I also want to note that in most (I think) European countries you have to take those days off. There's no 'this person hasn't missed a shift in 50 years and has 1000 vacation days saved up.

jv

Yeah, this is a part that gets missing in translation every time this conversation pops up online. There's always someone from the US that sees it and goes "yeah well, but actually in the US most of the jobs have some kind of vacation benefit included". And yeah, sure. But what we are talking about is that about the allowed legal minimum. When we talk about 22 vacation days plus 16 public holidays, that's what you get when you are working part time flipping burgers at McDonalds. Like, everyone, even the jobs with the worst possible working conditions, get at least that. From that, it's not uncommon for companies to offer extra vacation days as benefits, or (and I think this is mostly a spanish thing, I'm not sure if common elsewhere) making the fridays 'half' days where you work only until lunchtime and then have the afternoon off (so you work 37-38 hours per week instead of 40), etc.

Even the way we talk about this is kind of shocking: "Paid days off". When I started working closely with USians, that term sounded super weird, almost like an epithet. And then I found out that, in the US, there's this concept of "unpaid days off", where your employer allows you to take some days off... but they don't pay your salary to you those days*. That's, honestly, fucking bonkers to me.

So this conversation sometimes is hard to have because both sides find the context of the other side absolutely alien, and until they actually gets exposed to the reality of everyone else, the first reaction for everyone is "oh, but they sure don't mean that"