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Hi, Norwegian here, we have 5 weeks vacation per year, mandated by law. Oh, and the government takes 10% of your paycheck every month and pays it all out in July, so you have the money to go on vacation. Strong labor unions is the recipe.
American here. I work for a company that gives 5 weeks per year. It’s great. I can take a 1-2 week vacation in the summer and various days and weeks off throughout the year. It doesn’t hurt that my boss is great and almost never says no to time off. “Hey, this project is draining. I could really use a week off for mental recovery. It looks like nobody is off next week.” “Go for it.”
It’s possible, fellow Americans. Unions are the way.
5 weeks seems like a good minimum to shoot for, yeah. Even with technically “unlimited” vacation, I tended to take 1 week a quarter, 2 in the summer, and then whatever Christmas to New Year’s is. I wish I could take more in the Summer of course, but it is what it is.
aussie here. 4 weeks. required by law.
I’m probably going to move out of Austria in a few months and the one thing that’ll take a while to get used to is that in most other European countries you ‘only’ get 13 wages a year instead of the 14 I’m used to.
My vacation money usually goes to taxes each year as a Dutch citizen.
It’s a sick joke imo. “Here’s the money we took from your wage for vacation, but also here are the tax bills that are equal to that amount”.
Thanks i hate it.
I’m saving up my own wage for retirement and investing it myself because i have zero trust in these systems. I watched my dad get screwed out of a large part of his retirement money.
Nationalised oil probably helps too
We don’t have oil and we have the same in Denmark. I have 7 weeks paid vacation, and of course free healthcare and education, etc.
Can I come over?
You will need to learn the language if you want to stay for longer (like you should). Also, bring your friends and family, it’s not easy making new ones.
No, it is pretty standard European fare.
Yeah, well… Not being founded by insane protochristofascists probably helps?
I dunno, what are we calling the Romans these days?
Well, thry were, at founding, not christofascist.
Nah, but certainly prototyping it by some point.
They still admitted to appreciating wine and fucking.
We have pumpkin seed oil in Austria, and apparently its enough to give us 5 weeks PTO per year, 2 weeks of paid nursing leave and up to 72 sick weeks for a single illness.
Have you considered giving all that profit to one bald man, though? Think of what you’re missing out on! 🚀
4 weeks by law in the Netherlands, usually the union adds another week to that.
Nationalised natural gas probably helps too
j/k am Dutch
5 weeks by law in Finland as well
Same in France. We don’t have oil but we have strikes.
What’s stopping the US from nationalizing its oil and other natural resources?
The needs of the 0.1% outweigh the needs of the peasants.
Bribery.
1-2 weeks every 12-18 months is seen as a lot? No one tell them about europe 😶
I guess everyone is doing macro-retirement every year in EU.
Isn’t that like a short holiday?
In my home country a legal minimum is 4 weeks a year, so 1-2 weeks is half or a quarter of a holiday if you take it at once :3
Or if you split it into 2 parts you get 2 weeks off every 6 months instead of 12-18
In my US state state employees get:
- about 10 or 11 holidays, can’t remember
- two weeks of sick leave that accumulates if you don’t use it
- a week (?) vacation that increases over time to max out at 3 weeks vac at 15 years (does max out, is use or lose it and using is encouraged)
Private employers have NO legal requirement to offer any time off.
The disconnect between public and private benefits requirements are ridiculous.
I think we have 15 holidays we get a day off for, a month of paid vacation time from the start, aaaand infinite sick leave :3… and maternity and paternity leave, plus unpaid time off if you want that for some reason :p
Federal is a little better, 10-11 holidays, and 30 days vacation, plus 2 weeks of pure sick leave. But you are not encouraged to take holidays.
We get 4 weeks annual leave plus 2 weeks of public holidays
Ultra short holiday. I get seven weeks paid, usually take four off in a row nowadays and spread the rest around Christmas or whenever I feel I need to rest up from work.
No one tell them about the majority of countries.
Real :3
12-18 months??? I read it as weeks and was still considering it normal vacation.
You guys get vacations? Next you’ll tell me you get holidays off too or something…🫠
Well it’s either holidays off or double pay :3
Can confirm: I get 6 weeks paid vacation per year, and time spent on vacation is paid slightly more than actual work time.
What the fuck is this gaslighting propaganda bullshit? People in the US have been taking vacations for decades; it’s not exclusive to GenZ, nor is it a “new trend”. I call bullshit.
Quiet quitting is just doing your job/acting your wage.
People on the internet love to make dramatic sounding names for normal stuff.
CONTENT! ENGAGEMENT!!
‘This New Trend Called …’ is to Gen Z what ‘Breaking News: …’ is to Boomers: it won’t really impact your life straight away but still you feel you should listen to that FOMO calling.
Back in my day when the news said we killed an industry we actually did it
To be fair, “quiet quitting” is a labour action that goes back decades if not centuries. A more common name is “work(ing) to rule”.
I remember that term from when my teachers were preparing to strike a long while ago. The fact is, most workers, teachers especially, go beyond the bare minimums that their jobs require. It made a big difference when teachers who used to supervise after-school activities just went home instead. In jobs that are associated with “vocational awe”, it’s very common for people to do much more than the minimum requirements for their jobs, so when they engage in a “work to rule” campaign, there’s a really big difference.
Yes, that is the same thing as
doing your job/acting your wage
Except “doing your job” doesn’t capture that it’s a deliberate change in how you perform at your job, and “acting your wage” is a newfangled way of saying the long established term, with its on Wikipedia page, “Work to Rule”.
it’s just a new term for something that exists.
no idea why it was every a big deal.
now everything is a culture war for engagement.
was there any drama when we started calling “beouf” “beef”?
Not only was there drama people couldn’t talk about the beouf they’d gotten into without starting it up again
Speak for yourself. I’m all in on this trend and have even begun taking nano-retirements for about 16h each day.
taking a piss now counts as pico retirement.
yawning is a femto retirement
We don’t pay you to have a functional human biology, go back to work
Yeah I mean, you wouldn’t have any tourism aside from rich folks otherwise
that’s the contradiction inherent I’m the system, congrats, you win 5 Marx points
You’re wrong. NObOdY wAnT WokR anYmORe
You were young and stupid once. You know perfectly well that back then whenever you did something for the first time it was also the first time anyone in the entire history of the universe had done that thing.
Typical AI sludge, complete alien nonsense spouted confidently.
Yep that was my first thought too. Gotta be AI written because it makes zero sense.
The part that gets me is that syntactically and lexically it makes perfect sense, so you actually have to think about it before realizing it’s totally worthless. The old signals of quality and care in communication are meaningless.
People with poor critical thinking skills are going to be fucking lost at sea this coming decade. They have no tools to tell what’s worth believing anymore.
You mean truthiness?
How did we get to the point where this is published as something serious?
Can I go live naked in the forest and forage for mushrooms instead? I want to macro-retire.
Well you have fun.
Meanwhile I’m gonna MEGA RETIRE.
Which basically just involves croaking and not working for the rest of time
What if I train AI on your life’s data and force the AI you to work 9-5 until the Big Crunch?
This has got to be fake, or engagement bait, right?
Honestly, as someone who doesn’t like in America I feel like this wouldn’t surprise me if it was real from there.
Where I live you have minimum 4 weeks annual leave a year…
Everytime I read something that makes me frustrated or that sounds ridiculous I assume it’s rage bait because it almost aways is.
Is the original satire? I know Americans are obsessed with presentism on the job, but even they understand the concept of a vacation?
It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked at places that would definitely fire me for using a week of vacation, and legally in my state vacation isn’t a tangible guaranteed thing; it’s completely legal to just fire the employee instead if they try to use it without compensation. Practically some jobs don’t have time off. You just get fired.
Thats … really worker unfriendly
My wife was fired from a job for getting sick (kidney stones). We were told if we don’t like it, sue, but I bet you can’t afford either with the medical bills. It took us years to pay for that stone.
There are some very unkind people out there who take advantage of their position. It’s a right-to-work state which just means that you can be fired for any and no reason with no recourse. It’s dystopian as hell. Most people in these positions put up with it because they enjoy eating.
Stuff like this really makes me want to scream.
And yet people just recently voted to make it all much much worse.
Let’s hope the accelerationists are right, then
It’s all we can do. We can hope.
they have to prepare for when they eventually leave the trailer park and become the ruling class
I get that Americans like the illusion of freedom, but the only freedom here is enjoyed by the employer. That they can get away with it is so fucked up.
What are you, some kind of communist? Don’t make me call ICE on you!
I’ll call dobrint on you
Oh nein! Bitte nicht Dobrindt!
Wer wäre besser, Andi Scheuer?
Andi grote 🌚
Hey, hey, hey, slow down. We don’t want things to get ugly… and you also shouldn’t fire all your shots at once. The only measure that remains after Dobrindt is Söder (||─.─）
In the U.S. it’s a long propaganda history called “right to work.” It’s sold as being freedom and rights for the people, but really it just strips unionizing rights away and gives corporations power.
Like most laws in the U.S., it’s all lies and only abject morons buy it.
It’s backwards speak like most conservative legislation. Right to work actually means you have no rights at work.
Right to work is up there with unlimited vacation on the misleading propaganda front.
welcome to the USA! we hate our citizens
At my last workplace one of my colleagues took a couple of days off per week for 3 weeks to participate in some robotics competitions. He was teased and generally made aware how much of an inconvenience his planned absence was.
This same workplace made up a reason to fire me just because they didn’t like me. I can make a million and one guesses as to why I was actually fired, but the most telling part is they didn’t even stick to the reasons they provided for firing me when I applied for unemployment and the unemployment office called to verify details with them. They dropped all of the pretense they built up and basically just said I wasn’t a good fit for the team. I may or may not qualify for unemployment, I should find out soon.
Fortunately I’ve been doing some contact work for my previous employer on the side so I’ve been able to make that my main gig to try to keep the bills paid. I’m not sure what I’d be doing right now if I didn’t have that, given this job market is so terrible right now. I’ve been applying for 5-10 jobs a week for the last 6 weeks and I’ve had a single interview
My work offered a compressed work week for a few years where employees could work the same number of hours over 9 days every fortnight, meaning they could take every second Friday off still working the same number of hours. Employees based in NA didn’t get that benefit, instead of trying to get that implemented over there NA employees were practically celebrating when the company recently scrapped it everywhere else instead.
My experience of American work culture is very much toxic crab-in-a-bucket mentality, pull everyone else down instead of trying to make work life the littlest bit more bearable, ironically directly contradicting the company’s slogan. The amount of brown-nosing sycophants on all-teams calls is pretty insane too.
So yes, I very much believe this is something American media would say.
What the fuck, it isn’t satire? And other sites are writing articles on it?
Not satire: https://www.fastcompany.com/91357784/what-is-a-micro-retirement-inside-the-latest-gen-z-trend
But they specify that unlike PTO, this is an unpaid time off, which can be a break inbetween jobs or a unpaid vacation.
Still fucking ridiculous to call it “micro-retirement”
Soon we will hear how gen z is having nano-retirements every 5 days of work that can include 2 days of no work and often destructive behaviour such as parties and binge watching tv.
What about those eight hours at night? I mean people hardly even think about work while they are dreaming.
I think its called a nightmare usually
You mean my pico-retirement? Sometimes i lay thinking awake before i start it and yes, sometimes I have thought about work during it and yes sometimes I think about what the day holds just after coming out of it - but that’s why you need to have a nano-retiremtent after every four to five pico-reti’s you know.
I also try to stack them if I found myself to occupied with work. I’ll allow myself a pico during a nano for example, instead of raving all night I choose to do some self-care. It’s really about finding the right balance. Please leave a like and subscribe for more meaningful insights.
We need to abolish zepto-retirements (thinking about anything that isn’t work while not yet retired)
Don’t be too quick to judge what previous generations referred to as a lunch break, a replenished body can really help keep the workers functioning! ;)
Literally time theft, off with your head!
It’s bad enough they get your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.
I once had a dream that Steve Irwin had come in and wanted a tattoo of a budgie. Does that count?
Sounds like a billable hour to me.
Marketplace also covered the trend recently. They described it more as taking a few months to even a year or two off from work unpaid
I think they may have confused some terms here. Among my peers in engineering it’s quite common to take a few months between jobs to travel or relax. They usually call it funemployment. I totally get why one would want to take a longer break assuming you have sufficient savings before you quit. What this article seems to be describing is just unpaid vacation because we don’t have real vacation policies in the US.
Yes, it’s a real article, and it’s worse than you are imagining.
If you want to suffer some more the author has a website. There’s no actual content to be found there either.
Yeah this is just telling me we young people need to organize and demand more pto
Europe has this. You should too.
I was working in a European branch of a SF based private company. It’s a company that tries really hard to have good optics everywhere, from being listed as PBC down to “support and inclusion” talks.
US employees officially had “unlimited” vacation days, European had 25. Plus the company has a practice of giving an extra Friday off once a month, plus few days for Christmas break plus one year there was a week of summer break.
That year with a summer break employees in Europe got over 40 days of vacation. 35…37 without it. Plus bank holidays and sick leaves.
I was freaking out after learning that US employees with the unlimited time off were getting under 20. Whenever an employee was using more than 15 vacation days a year, they were presented with an inquiring interview from their manager trying to figure out why they need so much rest.
US has no work culture, it’s exploitation.
Unlimited PTO is an accounting dodge because PTO shows up as a liability on the books if it is defined, because if they liquidate the business they need to pay it out in lieu. And number doesn’t go up.
Which is why they also don’t allow carry-over in most cases.
Not unless you do it the right way, i.e. the way it is done in Europe. It is basically mandatory to take vacation days every year up to a specific number. Unlimited PTO makes it so you get extra. I also have a policy of a burnout vacation - if I notice you are burned out you get sent to a mandatory paid vacation. You get to refuse once, as a hangover excuse or “I’m fine, really”. But it I notice it again after refusal, you get a choice. Either you go to vacation, or you get fired. It doesn’t go into a tally of “I need to talk to this guy, he took 80 days off this year”, I treat it as if they’d worked. Oh, and 100% paid sick leave instead of a percentage, all they need is to talk to their doctor and they put in that they are sick in the system.
The agreement about time off is you get the 25 mandated by the law, anytime, without any request beforehand, as long as it won’t make the sun explode. Instead of people requesting time off, I request time “on”, if I need to work with them, have them in a meeting or train someone.
My “off the contract” ask to them is “I’ll try to treat you as fair as I can, and ask you to do the same in return”. I did get screwed over by an employee once, but so far I can still maintain this policy
Agreed.
The way I think it should be is:
- mandatory 25 days of vacation, plus statutory holidays
- mandatory vacation is subtracted from any performance targets (i.e. it is accounted for in business planning and not offloaded to the employee)
- vacation beyond that is unlimited, but may impact your performance
- major anniversary events within the company grant paid leave of absences
To the last point - I don’t recall which company it was - I have seen one where after a certain period of service your granted a 3 or 6 month leave of absence to go do something else. Travel the world, get really deep into Japanese joinery, or build a new version of DNS. I think that’s something that is healthy for humans.
That sounds so nice, especially as someone whose career encourages cycling of effort levels in its nature
A company telling you you’ve got unlimited off days is actually really bad because it means they will just engage in this judging practise.
If they tell you you’ve got 25 days then that’s great you know how many days you’ve got, if it’s unlimited they start being argumentative around day 10. So in reality people with unlimited time off actually end up with fewer days.
Working for a European company is great, currently I’m being told that I need to take 2 weeks off, in addition to the holiday I’ve already booked off.
Also you don’t get paid out for “unlimited PTO” when you leave. I have something like 45 days of PTO saved up, and if/when I leave my company, I will be paid for those 45 unused days along with any other severance package that is included. Unlimited PTO is a trap.
Charles currently takes work breaks every six months for two weeks at a time, and said he heard about micro-retirements from a friend. “I reward myself by traveling to different countries. Whether it’s Europe during the summer or other destinations, and so that’s a way that I incentivize myself to reach certain KPIs,” says Charles.
FML Charles has discovered holidays
Thats “the Onion”, right?
I mean, this cannot be written by a human who means this seriously. right??
Shit like this is published only to set the bar even lower than it is today. It has no other purpose as they know most intelligent people will not read anything but the headline. They just inject this dogshit into the collective consciousness so that they can normalize a type of work that is a little better than indentured servitude.
Wow, that article is really trying to make vacations “special” and trying to indicate most people want this “new” thing as a benefit, unpaid.
This is too stupid to share, even in a humorous or ironic sense. That’s rare. Holy hell.
This has to be a shitpost. I can’t believe this would be a real article.
…so you haven’t read the business press at any point this century?
I think it’s probably a typo caused by AI and a lack of editing. As i understood it, a micro retirement is taking between several months and a year long sabbatical after 1-2 years of working, which is a bit more interesting than 1-2 weeks. So basically, it’s working 1 year and taking a break from work for 1 year (whatever that entails, personal project, travel, possibly doing nothing at all).
That’s what i expected when it said “micro retirement”…something worthwhile like 6 months+
