Submitted 3 weeks ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to workreform@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/877dead0-02e6-4a6e-9b19-1672f66e8424.jpeg
Full title: BREAKING: Bernie Sanders just introduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act — a bill to guarantee at least two weeks of paid vacation to every full-time worker in America. Over 90 other members of Congress have already signed on to the legislation.
Wait - so currently it is legal for employers in the US to give ZERO vacation days to employees? Jeez, what kinda shithole country is the US?
They elected a ‘thing’ that’s obviously been a con man for decades.
A blatant racist, casino bankrupting corrupt piece of disgusting scum. Who has had nearly 30 court cases for sexual assault.
A so called human that has numerous websites tracking their obvious lies, thousands and thousands of confirmable and easily debunked lies.
Then there’s the 30 plus felonies. The numerous court cases and fines etc, some of which involve being fined for stealing from children’s charity’s.
The list goes on and on…
But, then, get this, then they fucking elected it again. And this was after the Covid debacle, an attempted insurrection, stealing of top secret documents to sell or use in nefarious manner, AND the Epstein-tRUMP files being in everyone’s faces.
That is what the us is to me now. And for the rest of my life.
A country so complacent/evil/stupid that they can elect one of the very worst ‘humans’ in living history… TWICE!
They elected a ‘thing’ that’s obviously been a con man for decades.
its unrelated to current conman. this been a problem for decades
So how many vacation days did the law mandate before 2016?
It’s a place where you’re expected to work until you die, mostly.
Oh honey…
neat. i’m salaried and have “unlimited flex time off” which means “you’re kept so busy with mismanagement of projects if you leave for two weeks you’ll screw your peers over.”
Always remember that when an employer says you’re screwing coworkers over by taking leave that the employer was free to hire another employee to make it so the workload would be reasonable, and that you as an employee had no such ability to influence the situation. All you are doing is taking leave for your own personal health.
ALL leave is health-related leave.
And any company offering you “unlimited” leave is just making it known that they’re the kind of company to make efforts to not have to pay you. “Unlimited leave” is a big red flag.
Don’t forget the psychological effect that it has on people that makes most people take less time off. Also the company can benefit from it by no longer having to agree to accrued time which means if the setup had people bankng time they would be paid out on it when they retire, leave, or get fired. This allows them to save all that money each person had been saving. If the company is willing to set things up like this you should always be asking how do they benefit from this change.
It’s crazy to think the majority or people working are all to young to know that at one time companies actually did try to come up with real incentives to keep its employees happy.
My company switched to unlimited PTO about 2 months before my son was born. Prior to the change the policy for paternity leave was 2 weeks plus any vacation days you wanted to spend. I had 2 weeks at that point so was looking forward to spending a month off with my new boy and helping the Mrs recover.
With the new policy they eliminated paternity leave and just had unlimited PTO. I had to press really hard for them to finally say to just take the month off and that they only would start to look at people who take more than 3 weeks off.
Part time and contractors should be included, not just FTE.
And it should be 4 weeks. To make up for all that “productivity” we already put in without time off.
…and to bring you in line with the rest of the world.
Contractors are difficult because they tend to be hourly, and hourly employees lose out when there is time off. My first studio would do typical 2 week shutdownns around Christmas time, but they stopped doing it because workers complained about lost pay.
They should definitely be added. But I think getting a foot in the door is more important while we still have this current administration.
How should this go about if I may ask? Genuinely curious to learn the terminologies behind this.
Is it a bonus? Paid leave?
Start with something.
Crazy that we’re fighting to achieve some of the lowest time-off standards in the developed world.
And we will fight tooth and nail and still lose
I think this is stupid. We need the bill to be way more aggressive, ambitious, and inclusive.
Here’s what needs to be happen for this bill to bring meaningful change:
Now THIS is a serious bill. It guarantees a generous 42 workdays (20 vacation + 5 sick time + 5 personal days + 12 holidays) worth of paid time off annually which that finally puts this country not just on on par with the rest of the developed world, but ahead. If the US is to serve as the leader of the free world, this is how it has to be done. This on top of the mandatory employment protections and extra paid time off for specific scenarios, makes this a truly worker friendly country. This kind of bill would increase happiness, improve health, and reduce stress for people hundreds of millions of people.
Now, I’m not naive, I know Republicans and corporate Democrats will try to water this down. However, even if we only end up getting 2/3 or even 1/2 of the benefits and guarantees on here then that’s still a huge win. You have to start negotiations from a high a place, so you’ll end up with something that’s at least acceptable. What Bernie proposed is starting from a low place to appease people who are genuinely greedy and apathetic to the point of evil. You can’t do that. You have to hit him hard and rally the people on your side. People will whine about me letting perfect be the enemy of good, but I’m not. I’m against letting mediocrity stop us from achieving anything meaningful. If the Democrats did less performative shit and focus on real change like my hypothetical expanded bill, they would sweep the GOP into oblivion.
And this radical plan would just bring the USA to the established standards of the developed world.
Actually, if the US offered 42 paid days off a year as in my hypothetical bill, it would rank first in the developed world alongside Monaco who also offers 42 paid days off. Also most countries in the developed world don’t mandate things like personal days, bereavement, or paid time off for mandatory civic duties. For the few countries that do, it’s very limited.
For example, a couple of countries in the Balkans offer 7 days of paid bereavement time per year, and that’s the highest in the world. Most countries offer only a couple of days or nothing at all. So offering 10 days for every loved that passes away in a single year would make this the most the most generous paid bereavement leave in the world.
Still though, we currently have nothing so anything would be nice at this point.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
What Bernie proposed is starting from a low place to appease people who are genuinely greedy and apathetic to the point of being evil. You can’t do that.
Without leverage, we have to do it this way. They just shut it down if it’s the slightest bit “radical”. Make it in a way that even the most rabid MAGA diehard can’t disagree with the idea.
I like your plan. We should create a website that lists those things we want instead of letting politicians make shit up for us.
We really should. It’s up to us organize and push change. Our complacency is what brought us to this point. We have to be active and demand our rights.
He can introduce the most sane, rational, logical bills this country has ever seen, and there’s no chance of it passing until after the 2028 election at best. Even with the current progressive momentum, there simply aren’t going to be enough votes to pass anything good unless progressives rout everybody else in both this year and the 2028 elections.
This. Even if it manages to pass through this deeply partisan Congress, it needs to be signed by the president. If the president refuses to sign, it’d have to be sent back with a supermajority to override the veto, which is simply unthinkable today.
Exactly. People are excited like this is a done deal. Good bills get INTRODUCED all the time. And almost without exception they die before they even get to a vote.
My immediate thought with this is that is to force the opponents to vote against it, so that it becomes another example to use as an argument for voting in people that aren’t against any progress.
I want to see who votes against it.
France adds on another 15 days of holidays, which can be taken at any time, not just on national holidays. It’s a total of 8 weeks.
Oh yeah, how many billionaires with doomsday shelters and yachts fleets does Frances have?
Check mate, frenchies.
(Goes to die in a ditch)
Are you saying France has vacation days, holidays and 15 days of holiday you can take whenever? Cause Denmark has 25 vacation days and 5-10 (Depending on what days 24+25+26+31/12 and 1/1 falls on and if you have the 24th and 31st of December off) holidays, so a total of 30-35 days off, meaning guaranteed 5 weeks whenever you want and 1-2 weeks of national holidays.
Many people in France will have 39 h/week contracts, but because the legal workweek is 35h, you actually accumulate 2 extra days per month worked
As is often the case in France, it’s complicated.
Basic paid leave for a CDI/cadre (full time employee) is 25 business days.
On top of that there is RTT. This is because we have a 35 hour work week. In order to the more typical 40 week, you get those hours back as more paid leave - 10 days.
On top of that there national holidays, of which there are plenty. Most of these revolve around food from what I can tell (I’m a Brit, I just live in France). If those national holidays fall on a weekend, you lose them though, which sucks, but even a bad year is pretty good.
This info is coming from a relative who was working in France. My understanding was he didn’t automatically get any of France’s scheduled holidays of unless he used leave to do so. So the bank of 15 “national holidays” was effectively converted into more leave.
“Rise in the number of part time employees surges as employers exploit this one loophole.”
Didn’t this already happen under Obamacare?
A bunch of service sector employers tried to schedule their staff at under 32 hours while still squeezing them for 40+ hours of work. Everyone hated the system, because it continued to leave the onus of health care on individual employers, while private premiums climbed. And then the courts + Trump Admin defanged any effective enforcement.
What a great system. So glad we weren’t simply covering everyone with Medicaid by default.
Yep! So instead of one full time job you had to juggle multiple part time jobs because a lot of business watch your hours like a hawk.
The jobs that are easy to part time to avoid benefits are already doing so. This doesn’t really move the needle on that.
Though, it would be a good thing to address that at some point.
What should happen is part-time employees should receive the same leave, proportional to the actual amount of time/days worked.
I don’t understand why the US hasn’t got powerful unions to defend workers rights. Don’t people organise themselves!?
Believe it or not, we have people who hate unions. Unfortunately it’s not without reason. Some unions are compromised and favor the company theyre made to oppose. It’s so crooked.
We have people in unions who hate unions. Apparently the propaganda Kool aid is a great flavor
I am a person who dislikes unions. There was a time when they didn’t suck and actually did lots of good. But these days, they are just looking to justify the over inflated union dues. They protect many shit employees. encouraging incompetence and lazy individuals while driving the cost up and up and up. Over regulating saftey to the point of just fucking stupid. Was on a job site recently, the use of a ladder over 5ft is forbidden, and you will be written up. You must have a fucking man lift. $200 ladder vs. $15,000min piece of equipment to change lightbulbs… nice.
Had to load a large piece of used equipment I bought from a union weld fab shop. I was over size so the trucking had to leave around 13:00-14:00 to make it back to destination before sunset. I had to have a truck they were loading pull out and have my truck back in. Great. My truck is in the shop, I get the piece rigged up and ready needed 5-10 min, guy walks over to me starts to lift the piece up. Lunch bell goes, walks away, and piece dangling in the air. Can’t get him to finish loading because it’s lunch… for fucks sake. Because of the lunch delay, I have to pull my truck out because they need the bay to load and wait. My truck doesn’t get loaded until 16:00 and have to guess what, pay for another full day of trucking.
It’s again and again baffling how backwards the US are. We’ve had four weeks minimum since before I was born, and I’m an ageing millennial
I have 24 days Paid Leaves here in Bulgaria. The thing is: if you do not take them all over the calendar year, they roll over to the next year, but by law the company must keep the cash on hand to pay them out. I was regularly starting the year with over 20 accrued days. And so were several 100s of colleagues. This has gotten so bad and froze so much cash that the company is now giving an extra 2 days if you use all your days before the end of the year. Sweet deal!
Shocking
Here in France I have 35 (not including national holidays).
In China currently it starts with 18 annual leave days and 12 sick days. Than every year, more annual leave days are added.
Yep. Almost everywhere already has this. We even get long service leave here in Australia
Two weeks is a pathetic amount of leave. I get four here and Australian workers are still pretty cucked by European standards.
10 days a year is ridiculously few
Notice how these charts always manage to fit in tiny European populations but completely erase non-Western OECD members? Centering white, Western nations as the default standard for global progress while ignoring the rest of the world is structural racism disguised as economic research.
Here is a list of the countries that they left out with paid vacation laws: Chile Colombia Costa Rica Estonia Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Slovenia Türkiye
In Sweden we got 2 weeks in 1938…
Oh look, something else Israel has that the US doesn’t
Germany has 20 required paid vacation days, though way more common are 30 days. Even most low end jobs I have seen provide that amount of vacation days. Though there are surely some shitty companies, which don’t adhere to that standard. Ah, and public holidays don’t count towards these vacation days.
Australia has 20 but…
Also 10 sick/carers leave, 10 domestic violence leave, 12 weeks parental leave + a government paid 6 months parental leave and lastly long service leave of 3 months after 10 years service + a bonus 10 days per year long service leave per year after that.
Y’all need to join unions.
Spain 1ups that by shifting any national holiday that falls on a weekend to monday or friday.
We have more than 20 in Poland. 26 at least. I think You can use up to 28. Plus , obviously sick days, which don’t have a limit and more than 10 holidays every year. And You can score an additional 2 every 2 months if You’re a blood donor. I’ve had a week of every 2 months this year and I’m not even through a third of my paid leave.
Good Ol’ Bernie, still trying to do nice things for everybody… The world would have been different if he would have been elected.
It gets shot down because it’s labeled as socialism and all the dipshit right-wingers will praise it then bitch endlessly all year about how they don’t get enough vacation time at work
Two weeks? That’s it? Sorry Bernie but fuck off.
This needs to be 4 weeks _ minimum_. If the USA can’t match the UK or Germany, then don’t even bother,
4 weeks paid vacation needs to be the minimum.
and if this became a law… everyone would magically become part time workers… all so that corporations would not have to pay out.
2 weeks. Is that it?
voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Two weeks or 10 days isn’t enough. Push for at least 20 days like most of the world has. Also force companies to provide sick days instead of using a shared pool. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice a vacation because you got sick of had to go to the doctor.
Alinor@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
(Im not American) While I agree 2 weeks is not nearly enough, isn’t this also a bit “perfect is the enemy of good”? Anything is better than nothing, and 2 weeks is at least a start. Pushing to 4 weeks can be done after the 2 weeks has been achieved.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Agree. In this political climate, getting any positive change is tough. This is a good first step that would have affected me at the first two of three FT positions I’ve worked. It’s not good enough long term imo, but it’s positive and I’ll celebrate the hell out of that.
voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
10 is better than what we have, but don’t start with what you are willing to negotiate down to. Start strong and be willing to compromise if that is what is needed. I don’t think mandatory minimum days off is a controversial issue except for the ruling class.
mrsilkworm@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
That’s exactly it. Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection
Carl@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
I’d argue we should start taking pages out of the right’s playbook. Start with hilariously unachievable numbers to drag the Overton window towards the left, so that your actual desired number seems more reasonable in comparison.
Basically, if you only want 14 days, start by listing 28. Then when the final bill that congress is voting on only has 14 days, you’re able to say you reached across the aisle and compromised.
Conservatives do it all the time. They’ll use conservative talking heads and influencers to float extreme ideas, and begin normalizing them. So that the conservative lawmakers can then start introducing more tame versions of the now-normalized insane ideas. Basically, drag the Overton window towards the right, and now your extreme policies don’t appear as extreme.
joostjakob@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But but America number 1, no? So the new law should push them to the first place. They could call it the America Number One act.
ttayh@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
No, this is conceding ground that could be used for negotiation before they even start. He’s asking for 2 weeks, negotiations happen -> maybe 1 week is achieved.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
TBH this doesn’t seem like a bill that was drafted with the intent of passing. More likely this is to give Democratic challengers of Republican incumbents something easy to confront them about when they inevitably vote against this. The bill reads as reasonable to the average worker, who may be less likely to support a candidate that voted against giving them a measly 10 days off.
benjirenji@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
If I get sick on vacation I get to recover my vacation days. Of course I need to prove it, so it’s not always worth it or practical, but it should definitely not be the same pool.
Carl@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
Yeah, my employer requires FMLA paperwork for any medical absences longer than 2 days.
Anyone who has ever had to do FLMA paperwork knows exactly how obscene that is. My doctor’s office charges for FMLA paperwork specifically because it’s such a chore. Which means that if I need to be out sick for longer than a few days, I have to pay my doctor’s office to fill the paperwork out.
freebee@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
It should be the other way around: if you are really sick multiple days during your vacation, you should get more vacation days because you didn’t have your vacation while sick. Since becoming sick right when your vacation starts is a strong indication of being seriously overworked for a long time.
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
That’s how it works here, in EU
Amberskin@europe.pub 3 weeks ago
What about not having ‘sick days’ but unconditional paid medical leave if deemed necessary by your MD?
That’s what we have, and although it can be abused (as everything) it seems the most humane and natural thing to have. You cannot know how many days you will be sick. Generally people doesn’t get sick at all!
voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
I’m not opposed to that. Would need to have a limited number of unverified sick days as Americans would abuse it, at least for a time. If you go to a doctor and they say it is necessary for you to be off work for 3 months, then an employer would have to respect that. There would also need to be punishment for retaliating against employees that have long sick periods.
One compromise is businesses could be compensated by the government for sick time employees use beyond what is given by company policy. If someone has to take two weeks and they were only slotted one, the government will give a fixed amount per day that does not exceed that employee’s daily wages.
curiousaur@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Agreed, that’s insane. I get like 3 weeks just around the holidays alone. Thanksgiving week, and about two weeks from Christmas eve through new years days.
Then unlimited vacation on top of that, from which I’ve already taken 4 weeks this year.
13igTyme@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
My job has separate PTO and sick hours. Only downside is the sick hours cap at 80, with 40 given each year. So I basically just take random “sick” days.
Whitebrow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ah, the “I feel too good to work today” sickness