I worked at a company where that was the standard, but every five years (!) you could apply for a whole month (!!) of unpaid (!!!) time off. I witnessed discussions on the employee blabbing mailing list where people who had worked there for five years or ten were talking about what they would do, and how a whole month of not working would affect them and some were not sure if they could stay away that long...
Meanwhile, in Sweden, I had six weeks of paid time off every year, and everyone has a legal right to four consecutive weeks in the summer, so most people take a month off every year. Not every five years. Everyone.
The cultural difference is absolutely crazy.
A second-order effect of this is that if people are gone a lot every year, it forces companies to have better redundancies, it forces companies to spread knowledge around, it forces them to make sure that everyone's job can be covered by someone else. This lessens the impact of someone quitting, because there should be people around who can at least somewhat do that person's job, so you are less likely to end up in a situation where someone quitting is a disaster for the company, because that person had made themselves essential as a crazy sort of job security.
We had to push people into taking vacations in my team, and we never, ever denied vacation requests, as long as people had earned the time off.
I really wish people were more pushy about their vacation time, because they've earned it, just like they've earned their salary. Not taking vacation time is essentially giving money to your company, which is dumb, because you get nothing in return.
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-much-vacation-time-and...
Anecdotally, I’ve had one job in the past 20 years that didn’t have at least 15 days PTO. Because of corporate policy, they wouldn’t budge. I asked for extra pay to compensate.
Hang on. So even if you have paid leave, is a yearly week or two's holiday really not usual in the US? You know to go spend a week hiking or skiing in the Rockies, or fortnight camping, or whatever is your thing.
Not being able to take a week or two straight to get away from civilisation would have me clawing the walls going stir crazy, and I'd probably find myself divorced. Quite apart from the practicality - a long weekend isn't going to work to visit Europe or anything remotely long haul. Even a weekend break taking in the Grand Canyon if you happen to be on the east coast barely works, it certainly isn't going to leave any time to chill and unwind.
That's interesting, as I recall many couples get divorced after being on vacation together because they spend most of the year separated but they discover during vacation that they can't stand each other.
Two weeks at 1 year, three weeks at 5 years, and 4 weeks at 20 years, typically. (That's tenure at one company, not total experience.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/heres-how-many-paid-vacation...
EDIT: And note, lots of workers don't get separate paid sick leave, and those that do get very small allotments compared to anywhere else in the developed world.
My new employer offers 3 weeks of vacation plus 3 days of PTO. That's it. Everyone at the senior level and above gets that. If I had worked for my dad's employer with a similar amount of seniority, I'd be looking at 4-5 bankable weeks of vacation each year.
His employer routinely offered negotiated severance for people with X years of employment. He took one of their packages. They paid him 2 years salary complete with healthcare coverage and 401k for those years, and then he was able to use his accumulated vacation. He went into the office twice in 4 months and then cleared out his desk before retiring to a nice pension.
