Vacation Days Comparison

Now that I'm done w/ Lost Coast pictures, I can start publishing these other posts that I've been working on- I restrained myself to keep all the Lost Coast blogs together. Anyway, after hearing that France gets something like 37 days off a year on NPR, I was pretty livid and sad at the same time so I though I'd see how the US fairs against all the countries in the world (well many). To summarize- NOT WELL!

"Workers in the United States do not lead the world in dedicated hours at work, Korea holds the top spot in 2005. However stateside professionals log 100 hours per year more than those professionals in Japan, and 389 hours more than professional workers in Europe. The average workweek in the United States puts workers behind the desk for 44 hours." (Link)

I thought we were supposed to be the greatest country in the world, at least that's what I've been told my whole life...

Wikipedia statutory minimum number of days off by country: (Link) - the US is listed at 'none' however the average is 14days off including sick days- which places us in the mix with China, Korea, and Japan...don't even get me started on Europe- those guys make us look bad, again...


The *'s are for two different things- like I said before, technically the US is at zero, but that isn't true for most people so I put it in at the average of 14days off. Mexico has a ramping up of days off so I put in what you have after 5 years since most American's don't stay at a job for much more than 5 years these days. + I wanted to add to this- the days off of the other countries don't include 'for most people', but rather are bare minimums. I bet (though don't know) that since this is the bare minimum, some professionals have a 'more than minimum' number of days off, and hence to do a fair comparison with the US, the other countries on this graph would need to be shifted up from where they are.

This is from the Wiki link I put in there and I'm not sure how their tables are calculated, like does this include the national holidays that 90%+ of the people get off of work? I don't think these numbers do include those days based on some other sources. Also, while I didn't include all of the countries that the Wiki link has in it, I tried to do a fair cross section without making the US look too bad, as there were many many many many more countries falling into the 20-30 range than I have shown here. Finally, I'd like to point out that many of the 'less developed' countries like Saudi Arabia, India, and South Africa are ahead of us in number of days off.

You have to ask yourself, what does quality of life really mean?