I mean, *gestures at the US*.

There are no federal or state laws mandating paid vacations or holidays. That's entirely at the discretion of the company.

There is no federal paid sick leave mandate. Some states have them.

We have a federal right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for qualified medical and family situations under a law called FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act. Even that has limitations - small businesses, highly compensated employees, and new employees are carved out.

When you are hired, all of these are defined by the companies policies or what you can negotiate. If you have paid vacation time that accrues it'll be paid out if you quit; most companies don't like that, so they give you "unlimited time" on the approval of management. But because we have no statutory protection, your unlimited time could legally be "zero hours".

This is also illegal in Mexico: Your contract must say the number of vacation days you have, particularly because at the end of every year you get a "vacation bonus" (prima vacacional) that is proportional to your total yearly vacation days (25% or 50% pay of each day). If you don't use it, they still have to pay you. Of course if someone put that they give ∞ vacation days, the amount to pay yearly to each employee will be quit a bit haha.

I imagine it would depend on the state. In California, I believe they can get away with putting "0" as the number of vacation days you are entitled to, so any of the "unlimited" days you take off are really at the whim of your employer.

Where I am in Canada (and I imagine many states) there are legal minimum requirements so I officially get "3 weeks" vacation, but take a couple weeks on top of that using the "unlimited" policy. So "unused" vacation would be paid out according to the official 3 weeks policy in my case. I could see something similar being possible in Europe, but I think in practice europeans already take more paid time off than most North American's with unlimited vacation.

There's no accrued PTO. You just work it out with your mgr and then just...go. And you get paid for it (at least in the companies I've had it) and come back and just go back to work.

I believe different states have different laws, but at least in my state an employer is required to pay you for your accrued PTO when you leave the company. Therefore, they have to have (and accurately track) PTO on their accounting books.

Years ago, the company I work for switched from accrued to unlimited PTO at the end of the fiscal year in order to make the books look better. When it was announced, they basically told everyone to take the remainder of the month off. The fiscal year happened to be the same as the calendar year, so most people were taking huge chunks of time off due to the holidays anyway and didn't really care. For those who had more PTO than what was left, they were told to work with their managers to arrange for as much time off as they felt was necessary in compensation.

This only worked because it was a one-time deal and the managers were (and mostly still are) very reasonable and supportive people. A while later we were merged with another company and they switched us back to regular PTO to be in line with their own HT policies.

It basically makes time off an informal thing. You just don't show up for work when agreed with your manager.