July 4, 2012 |
Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com
Imagine this: You work 25 hours a week at the McDonald’s in Cairo, New York, and have finally earned
two weeks of paid vacation.
You set out on a bike trip. On the first day in the saddle, you hit a
pothole and crash, cracking your collar bone. You sit on your couch for
the rest of your vacation watching the Tour de France. Tough luck.
Unless you worked for McDonald’s in Europe. If you did, you would be entitled to a fully paid do-over, according to a June 21
ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union,
the highest court in Europe (whose rulings must be followed by all
member states). This court ruled that all European workers are entitled
to their full vacation after they have healed:
“A worker who becomes unfit during his paid annual leave, is entitled
at a later point to a period of leave of the same duration as that of
his sick leave.”
This means that European workers can take their paid sick leave during
their paid vacations, and take their vacations all over again, and guess
what? American corporations who do business in Europe, like McDonalds,
have to pay for it!
And the comparisons between American and European workplaces get worse:
Not only do American corporations with operations in Europe have to
provide their workers with paid sick leave during worker vacations, but
also,
by law they have to provide paid vacations in the first place, which in most countries amounts to a month or more.
In the U.S. there is no
legal obligation at all. If you get a
paid vacation it’s either because the company “gave” it to you or
because you achieved it through collective bargaining. Here’s a
table comparing developed nations by statutory minimum annual leave and paid public holidays. Read ‘em and weep.
(click for larger version)
What about paid medical leave?
Fuggetaboutit. We don’t have any laws that mandate paid leave for
pregnancy, sickness, or care of sick family members. When it comes to
paid maternity leave, the U.S. is one of four countries, out of 173
studied,
that fails to provide paid maternity leave. The other three are
Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. (I guess with all our money
going to Wall Street, we can’t afford it.)
Wait, wait, This just in: We do have the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) which provides us with the legal right to request
unpaid medical
leave. Well not quite. You have to work at an employer with 50 or more
employees or work in the public sector, and you have to have to meet
certain conditions to be eligible. The net result, according to the
U.S. Department of Labor, is
that only “slightly more than half (54.9 percent) of U.S. workers (and
46.5 percent of private sector workers) also meet the FMLA's length of
service and hours related eligibility requirements.”
So if you work at McDonalds in Vienna, Austria, by law you get a full month off (22 work days) in your
first
year plus 13 paid public holidays for a total of 35 days. And after six
years of flipping burgers you get 36 days of paid vacation plus 13 paid
public holidays for a total of 49 paid vacation and public holidays –
that’s more than two months off, paid! (That’s in addition to your paid
sick leave, maternity and paternity paid leave, and paid leave to care
for a sick relative.) And you’re covered whether you’re a full-time
manager or a part-time employee.
In upstate New York, McDonalds “gives” you two weeks paid vacation
after one year of service provided you work a minimum of 20 hours a week
for one year. (Your vacation pay is “
based on the average weekly hours worked, multiplied by your rate of pay.”)
Same company, same product, but our lack of legal protections show
clearly that in our countries Corporate America is at the helm. (Can you
imagine what a McDonalds would say if you asked to start your vacation
again because you became ill just after you began it?) Economists call
our lack of legal protections “labor market flexibility,” as if it were a
good thing. Sicko.
Overall, the
picture in the U.S is even bleaker. In Europe
all
workers, both part-time and full-time, are entitled by law to the same
paid vacations. However, in the U.S., only 36 percent of part-time
workers are “given” any paid vacation at all, and only 37 percent
receive any paid holidays. So when you combine full-time and part-time
workers in America, on average we receive only nine days of paid annual
leave (vacation/sick days) and six paid holidays. That’s downright
pathetic.
But wait, isn’t all that extra vacation wrecking Europe?
That certainly is a widely held view among conservative elites (who, of
course, have plenty of paid vacation and sick leave of their own). They
tell us that Greece’s downfall is the result of too much time off to
drink and be merry. As
Time magazine
reports:
Last fall, the chairman of the China's sovereign wealth fund, Jin
Liqun, tied Europe's economic troubles to its "sloth-inducing,
indolence-inducing labor laws." Earlier this year, Mitt Romney warned
that European-style benefits would "poison the very spirit of America."
And British-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has written that in
contrast to Americans' Protestant work ethic, Europeans have an "atheist
sloth ethic."
Even Angela Merkel, the German prime minister said, "We cannot have a
currency (the euro) with one person getting lots of holiday and another
person very little.”
Unfortunately, these illustrious personages are letting their
conservative ideologies blind them to the basic facts: Germans have much
more paid time off than do the Greeks and their economy is doing much
better than ours – as well as the rest of Europe’s. According to a 2011
Eurofound study,
“coupled with public holidays, the average German has 40 days of
holiday a year -- still tied with the Danes for the most in Europe.
Greeks and Portuguese by comparison each average 33 days vacation a
year, including public holidays.”
Furthermore,
Time reports that “there's the growing body of
research showing that time off can actually help workers get more done. A
2009 study in
Harvard Business Review, for example, showed that
requiring business consultants to take time off every week actually
boosted their productivity." Similarly, a study by
Ernst & Young “showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed.”
So why do American companies provide so many vacations days in Europe and so little in the U.S.?
Because they have to. It’s the law of the land in Europe and if
American companies want to do business there they have to play by those
rules. But where did those rules come from?
The story starts after WWII when the United States wanted to make sure
Europe wouldn’t slip into the Communist orbit. At the same time we also
wanted to remodel Germany so that it would not rise again to cause
another world war. The solution was two-fold. First, using the money and
muscle, we “encouraged” the empowerment of non-Communist unions all
over Western Europe. Imagine that! The U.S. made sure that unions would
flourish (as long as they weren’t friendly to the Soviets). In addition,
in Germany, we encouraged “co-determination” which meant democratizing
corporations by putting worker representatives on the corporate boards
of directors. The unstated purpose, at first, was to make it less likely
that the giant German steel and coal conglomerates would ever again
become the bedrock of a fascist state.
By the mid-1970s, it became clear that the policies were good both for
business and for working people so the idea spread throughout Europe.
Also, government policies encouraged “works councils” that brought
together labor and management from the shop floor to the corporate
level. The overall result of empowering unions in Europe was the
establishment of national legislation in support of paid vacations, paid
sick leave, paid maternity and paternity leave and many other
pro-worker policies.
Meanwhile back in the USA, we headed in the opposite direction. Rather
than empowering unions, as a matter of policy we crushed them, a process
that has accelerated since President Reagan broke the air traffic
controllers' strike. Through a variety of court rulings it became more
and more difficult to organize new workers. The laws that did exist were
so weak that management could easily fire workers who engaged in union
organizing activities even though it is a legally protected right. When
unions pressed for legislation to stop union busting, and to plug porous
labor laws, they got nowhere in Congress, no matter which party was in
power. So while unions became more stable in Europe, union density in
the U.S. dropped from a high of 35 percent in the private sector in
1955, to less than 7 percent today. That, my friends, is why Corporate
America is making suckers out of us. We don’t have the muscle to take
them on.
Here’s a graph that shows why our muscles have atrophied. As unions decline, so does our middle-class way of life:
Clearly, corporations have more than enough money to provide us with
the same vacation plans as they do workers in Europe. But they would
rather “let the market decide” – which is French for setting up and
taking advantage of a downward spiral in wages and benefits. It’s not a
coincidence that defined pension funds in the U.S. are becoming extinct
(but not so in Europe). It’s not a coincidence that median family wages
are declining. It’s not a coincidence that public and private sector
workers are being pitted against each other as the downward spiral
accelerates. It’s not a coincidence that working people in this country
are being asked to sacrifice in order to pay for the damage that
financial elites have done to our economy.
In Europe workers are not fighting each other. Rather they are standing
in the way of any and all efforts aimed at eliminating their cherished
benefits – benefits that go to union and non-union members alike. Even
the austerity-minded German political leadership dare not touch those
cherished vacations.
So next time you get some time off, think about what it might be like
to have paid maternity and paternity leave or have a couple of months
vacation at full pay (and, of course, full protection against illness
while on vacation) ... and then maybe think about how we might join
together to fight for these very basic human rights that nearly the
entire human race, except us, enjoys.
Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of
The
Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed
Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).
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