- 4 weeks paid holiday
- 4 months unpaid parental leave, 14 weeks paid for the mother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_labour_law is the best overview I can find.
Like, there are insurances and government assistance programs that businesses use to pay for things like parental leave.
US businesses get no such help. So what is often attributed to US business greed is actually political greed, while businesses are just casualties.
The reason, I believe, is that there are random checks by the health service to ensure people on sick leave are actually sick. But if you only take a day off due to a headache, by the time it gets registered and checked you could have already got better - so your claim is hard to verify.*
A dishonest employer could easily defraud the system by claiming a lot of individual, unverifiable "sick days" and getting the state to pay for a nice chunk of his payroll expenses.
By contrast, an employer gets alerted sooner of an absence and is in a much better position to guess whether an employee claiming fake sicknesses. In case of suspicion they're legally allowed (at a small fee) to have a physician check on their employee from day 1.
* now that I think about it, with everybody having a camera phone nowadays, this might eventually be solved - a video call might not be enough for a diagnosis, but it can probably tell "yep you're sick" with a reasonable degree of confidence?
>Like, there are insurances and government assistance programs that businesses use to pay for things like parental leave.
>US businesses get no such help. So what is often attributed to US business greed is actually political greed, while businesses are just casualties.
It really depends what are we talking about. In case of paid holiday leave (for example in Poland) everyone in normal employment gets at least 2 uninterrupted weeks by law. However even in my very first job many years ago I got 4 weeks total paid leave. All the pay gets paid by the employer.
However, there are things like maternity leave that can take a year. It is unreasonable to expect an employer (perhaps a small business) to pay an employee for a year of maternity leave. So during this time one is entitled to 80% of their pay, but it is paid not by the employer, but the national insurance. The actual amount taken by people varies. It can be split between parents, voluntary given up etc.
Then there is sick leave. If I remember correctly the usual thing was for the employer to pay for few initial days, the rest was paid for by the local equivalent of national insurance.
In IT 26-28 days are common.
