Germany has plenty of unions and Mercedes, BMW, Audi seem to be doing well enough
You have two sides, with U.S. on one side where workers just work, with little thought for quality of life, and the other side is Europe, where they get paid a bit less, but they have 4 weeks vacation and much less demanding work load.
I dunno about you, but I'd gladly sacrifice $10K(which is pretty much the whole difference between the two) to get all the perks that europeans get
You can quit and take time between jobs. $10K should let you backpack around Europe for about 3-6 months, which is more of a perk than Europeans get.
I'm not quite sure why more people don't do this. Bank a bunch of money at a nice professional job, then quit and be funemployed for 6-12 months while they do lots of cool, life-affirming things. A bunch of my friends have done it - either backpacking around the U.S, or buying a Eurail pass and traveling around Europe, or vacationing in Thailand, or helping orphans in Uganda, or joining the Peace Corps - and have said it's one of the best things they ever did. It doesn't even take much money - most of these are liberal arts majors, not computer programmers, and make much closer to $50K/year than $100K/year.
For a few months that's possible, but at 12 months it starts getting tricky if you ever want a job again. May be less of a problem in tech, but in a lot of areas if you're "long-term unemployed", HR just screens out your resume; companies seem to only want to hire employed or recently-employed people (cf. http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/ct-biz-0905-wor...).
HR isn't going to read your blog, and HR is, sadly, the gateway to (just a guess here) 90% of job opportunities. If you have an 'in' at the company, you can bypass HR's initial gating, and your plan will work, otherwise it's unlikely.
The point isn't to get HR to read your blog; the point is to fill up that timeslot on your resume so that automated screening systems don't reject you for having a gap. If you'd worked at a regular corporation, it's virtually certain that HR wouldn't be able to see your work product either.
It's currently pretty hard to get a job again on the other side of the vacation. Plus for most people in the USA wages are so low it's hard to even save $10K. 48% of the population are living on or below the poverty line.
I did this last year and found a new job within 3 months of coming back. (The job is incomparably better than my old job in every way.)
Plus, when your audience is the Hacker News readership it would seem to make little sense to draw conclusions based on the bottom 48% of the population.
Hate to burst your bubble, but even poor people read hacker news. In my job, I make 14851 per year. I also drive 45 minutes to this job, because it was the only one I could find.
Or, perhaps, you'd like to make a supposition that smart people can never be poor?
There's no job security in having a job, these days.
I think that if you want job security, you're much better off at developing the skills to interview well and the resume to make people sit up and take note of you. You can take that from job to job with you, and know that if you ever get laid off or fired, you can just get another job.
If you're taking <12 months between jobs, COBRA takes care of health insurance. It can get expensive, but that's why you bank money while you're working...
and in the states, you are lucky if you get 3...with 2 weeks being much more common...and that's the middle class jobs, the lower class ones, you are lucky to get a day of paid vacation
in Australia, we get 20 days holiday, 10 days public holiday and up to 10 days sick leave, so up to 40 paid days off per year.
Holidays and sick days are cumulative too, and you're entitled to be paid for untaken ones when you leave your job, so log as you've worked there a minimum of 1 year
As far as I understand, Europeans count stat holidays, and Americans don't.
A typical American gets 2 weeks of stat holidays on top of their 2 weeks of personal holidays, so that's almost the same as the European getting 4 weeks.
that is not true. In Europe, when you say "I have 30 days of holidays", that means 30 days that you can personally take off whenever you want (more or less). National holidays, like Christmas, are never counted because they are free for everybody. So assuming the US and Europe have a similar number of national holidays, you get about 2x more personal holidays in Europe.
(Again, this varies. In Germany it is usually around 28-30, in Spain around 22)
Erm, I've never received so little holiday, even when I worked low paid manual work.
Currently I get 25 days per year not including 6 days stat, for 31 days total or just over 6 weeks total. This is considered average for London and the UK, I would consider 5 weeks to be the absolute low end in the UK. At the upper end in London the news about the Tube Drivers strike disclosed that they have 40+ days holiday, which is just over 8 weeks.
When I lived in Sweden the numbers were higher, with it being compulsory to take a fortnight in a contiguous block in the summer. The UK is the worst of the lot, and we have it OK.
Just my experience, but it varies so greatly from what you're quoting that I felt obliged to respond.
Indeed, continental Europe is a lot better than the UK. In the Netherlands holiday allowances can roll over for up to five years. My 30 days + public holidays is reasonable in the UK, and compared to the US (where I worked for four years, so have some comparison here) is heavenly.
It depends on the country, but Denmark counts them separately: there are 12 official state holidays that you get off regardless, plus a minimum of 5 weeks of movable holidays (often 6, but 5 is mandatory), so 7 1/2 to 8 1/2 weeks total.
Another data point, in Ireland, your public holidays (of which Ireland has 9 per year) are not included in your (legal minimum of) 20 days annual leave. So in total, you can get 29 paid days off.
But not the German one. Actually it's one of the best working system in the world nowadays. And if you look at other well performing countries in Europe - Scandinavia, Switzerland, they are nowhere working like crazy. Holland has quite a sustainable pension system. I think you are over-generalizing. Sure, some countries are in deep shit, but that's not the social model that's in cause, rather a lack of accounting, lower business moral, lower education level, etc. There are also non social states going bankrupt.
I think you miss the point, this move from VW is actually acknowledging that taking time off is a step toward more productivity. I also think that having time for family, culture and further education on non related topics is the best way to make you a round person and thus someone who will be highly efficient in its job life. If that's how you would define Europe, it hasn't worked that bad... I mean, there have been centuries some people are saying the demise of Europe, but it's still one of the richest big area in the world.
Europe has gone through so much more worse crisis than the debt crisis, it will take its game together and solve it.
Not really. The strong economies of Europe (France & Germany), the ones that are bailing out the other countries, have the highest number of employee rights and annual days holidays. It's the examples of neoliberal 'light touch' countries (like Ireland) that need bail outs.
When you consider that in the UK NI is 11/12% and that covers the NHS and your state pension plus SERPS (second state pension) and unemployment benefits.
I knew a guy who emigrated to the USA and was working for CITI and was paying a bigger % of his pay just for his health cover.
NI isn't hypothecated - the money the government collects through NI is thrown into the pot with almost all other taxes. NHS & pension payments come out of general taxation.
so its not coming out of my pay and companies don't have the expense of running their own health systems and they dont need to employ extra HR people to administer them. It also means that startups don't have to compete against big companies that can afford health benefits which act to lock employees into big companies
