It's pretty well known around the world that holiday time in the US is fairly abysmal, so I won't dwell too much on that other than to say that 10 days plus public holidays is, quite frankly, appalling. I'm used to 5 weeks, and the UK does less well than its continental neighbours. Although the European economy is crumbling at the moment, I'm sure it's nothing to do with holiday time. Not even in Greece. It's mostly because we gave all our money to the banks so they could, dunno, make confetti with it or something. Sorry, getting side-tracked. Back to holidays.
People generally argue that the US has more public holidays than the UK, so it balances out. Well, there are 10 Federal holidays (plus inauguration day, which comes round every 4 years when a new president gets sworn in). That's only 2 more than England & Wales and 1 more than us Scots and the (Northern) Irish (us Scots need 2 days to recover from New Year and you couldn't pay me enough to make any comment about the Battle of Boyne). Plus any extra days given whenever the
Maybe USians are harder working than their cousins across the Atlantic. Perhaps Europeans work more effectively in their shorter working year? Who knows. I'm not going to get into that. I won't moan about holiday time because we knew what it was like before we came. What I didn't know about, though, was what happens when you need to take non-holiday leave.
There is no legal requirement in the US, at the Federal level, for employers to give employees any paid time off for illness, no matter how serious it is. Four states (well, three because DC isn't a state) have passed local laws mandating some form of sick leave. The only legal protection for most workers is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA states that any company that employs more than 50 people has to give their employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family or medical reasons. In these 12 weeks, the employer cannot fire the employee or cut off health insurance.
This law was only passed in 1993 and is all good and well, if you can afford to take unpaid leave. I guess if you're working a minimum wage job with crap (if any) health insurance, you're pretty screwed. And I don't want to think what happens if you have a long-term (and expensive) illness once those 12 weeks are up and your employer no longer has to pay health insurance. Yikes.
Of course, many employers have their own provisions. My wife's contract officially allows her to take 15 days per year combined sick and holiday time. So if she has a flu, she has to drag her sorry arse to work and infect all her colleagues if we want a summer vacation. And this is her with an academic job! Larger employers, including Federal employers, sometimes allow workers to donate unused holiday time to colleagues who are seriously ill. Which is heart-warming, if surprising that people actually have unused leave from those 10 to 15 days. Of course, me being a European socialist, I would think that a basic duty of employers would be to provide some sort of cover for their employees and that the government's job should be to legislate for that. But hey, what do I know!?
Another, even more surprising bit of information concerns maternity (or parental) leave. Yes, when you get to my age, you start to consider these things. The USA is one of only four countries in the whole world that has no statutory maternity leave, with the other members of this exclusive club being Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Compare this to the UK's LEGAL MINIMUM six weeks at full pay plus another 33 at £128.73 per week, or to Norway's 56 weeks at 80% pay or 46 weeks at 100% pay, to be split between both parents.
Of course, while the US is almost medieval in its legal provision for parental leave, many employers are much more progressive. We can, after all, take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave under FMLA. I think most women take around 4 weeks off, at which point they have to pass their newborn baby on to a stranger to raise for them. That seems very weird to me. And, given the cost of child care, if you had twins it's not worth working because one salary would go entirely to those costs. Yikes. Give me European socialism any day of the week.
Since I usually have photos on the blog these days which are loosely thematic, have a picture of us on a frantic three-day holiday in Canada last week:
(*) According to Google, I do have regular readers. I assume it's only friends who actually know Dom and I so... who is in Belize!?
