Hacker News Reader

Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick...

Could be better for sure, but a graph showing the US as having 0 days of paid days off because the federal government doesn't mandate anything is misleading at best. Average US worker after 1 year of employment earns 7 sick days and 11 vacation days. And likely has some state and federal holidays off as well, and could very well qualify for state required PTO and sick time. But that doesn't get clicks and attention.

More data, if one is curious:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t06.htm

View on HN

> earns 7 sick days

Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?

On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.

Can confirm in non-European country. In Dominican Republic they don't count either

I included them to show that, on average, PTO does not need to be used for sick time and to show that the vacation time is vacation time.

> "workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation"

It looks like in Germany it's 20 days a year - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sick-days-absentees-mental-hea...

Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.

The sick leave has to go through the healthcare system. That said, there are doctors that would just blindly approve, but it's not exactly a norm.

A lot of those sick days are also childcare.

Genuinely curious now: If you have a cold or a cough, or maybe a slight fever, do you have to talk to a doctor to get a day or two off of work?

In my country most if not all corporate jobs offer private healthcare plans that let you have an unscheduled online chat with a doctor. You can get one day of sick leave that way. Sometimes two. If you need more you will most likely be asked to show up for examination in person.

I'm in the USA and I've never had to do more than inform my employer that I'm not coming in because I'm sick. I guess it varies by employer.

Well, yes.

You can't just not show up for work and call in sick. Within the same day you have to call your doctor and explain the symptoms and they have to start the paperwork for the sick leave. Even if it is for a day.

For a cold or a cough you would not get sick leave, though.

It depends on the country and company, but usually there are some days you can take off without evidence, and when you need more, you need a doctor's note.

In the Netherlands: This exactly, generally after a few days you get a call by the "company doctor" (it is not from the company, but the literal translation) with an invite to discuss your health issues.

Generally yes if you don't want your vacation quota to get reduced.

In my country we get paid 80% of our usual pay on sick days prescribed by doctor.

We also can get an appointment online and get that sick day. We can also get sick days up to 3 days prior.

Also you can get a sick day if your kid is sick.

Sick days as other wrote is prescribe by a doctor. It doesn't have a limit (e.g. .y college broke his leg and was on sick leave for 1.5 year). And his vacation time accumulated, he didn't use his 26 days first year so the next he had 52 days to use.

Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.

I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days?

If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.

If we avoid work when we're sick so that we don't get other people sick, wouldn't that result in a healthier population? I guess I'm confused as to why it wouldn't result in that?

Life expectancy in the US is lower because we're all overweight. Infant mortality isn't a standardized metric, so it really shouldn't be used to compare health systems, even though people try to do so all of the time. A lot of infant mortality in the US is due to there being 1.5-2x as many births to mothers under the age of 20 (versus what one might see in Europe), which is really a societal problem, not a healthcare problem.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db371.htm

It is hard to know for sure, there could be some advantages to more pathogenic exposure in terms of group immunity but it is challenging to study and the particular types of pathogens that get passed around would matter a lot too.

- If I know my employer only gives me 5 days, I'll go to work with a cold and save them for if/when I really need them.

- If I don't get paid my full salary when I'm sick and I need the money, I'll go to work sick and infect others. I can't afford to not make it someone else's problem.

- If there's a strong culture of "people aren't really sick, they're just lazy" or an implicit "people that take too much time off are less likely to be promoted", I'll go in sick.

> Are you all really that sick?

Well, no. These are averages. Obviously, some people take more sick days than others; e.g. women with severe period pains might take days off each month.

> Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels?

Sick days are not just for "illness", so they aren't an indicator for overall health.

> Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.

I could make a snarky response about US education or something, but instead, I just want to point out that I find it strange how people in bad situations often defend their circumstances, rather than trying to change them.

Except for some drastic cases I've not seen people taking more than 2/3 single days a year.

In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped, so any missed day is a missed paid day. When social security comes into play they tend to pay the base pay of the position.

That would mean that if you miss a week because of an illness you might see a salary reduction close to a fifth of your monthly salary. That's something that most people don't have the luxury.

Apart of that most companies treat any medical leave after the third (yearly) as suspicious, which needs extra investigation.

So as we might not have a limit, and it's relatively paid, most people do meagre use of it.

What countries? Above peoplemwrote about Germany.and didn't mention such strange limit of first few days. Also in Poland there is no such thing. You can have a sick leave for 1 day and you get paid the same amount as if you get 3 weeks - 80% of your salary.

I work in a multinational with people on UK, Spain, Portugal, and some other countries. I know this happens in Spain and UK.

> In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped

I don't think that's true.

I know this happens in UK and Spain, at least.

2-3 weeks is probably an average skewed by burnt out (or seriously sick, cancer) people taking 9 months to get better

> employment earns 7 sick days

ugh, "sick days", what an absurd concept. If you are too unwell to work, you don't go to work , of course, and get paid while at home, until you're healed. Not 7 days, not 2 days, just the amount of days required. putting a number on that. ugh

and 11 vacation days. Wauw. After a decades of working in Europe you can get a good amount of holidays. in 2025 I had 49 day of which 20 are that minimum you start out with. Every overtime and outside business hour call also gets recovered, that's an extra 3 days so we've passed 50.

but what else is new, in the 80 and 90s workers in US were boasting about doing 80hrs of work each week... like wtf :). They live to work, I prefer to work to live life.

I wouldn't take into account sick days, because this article doesn't also.

I was mentioning it because the data does and also to get ahead of people claiming that US PTO includes sick time, when it mostly doesn't.

The point is that it is a limited amount of paid sick days, which is a completely foreign concept in most places (pun intended).

I think an interesting point here is there is no substantial difference between allocated vacation days if you work for the government or a private employer. One would think the government would set a good example.

11? And that's good?

Where did I claim that? I stated the opposite. I started my sentence with "Could be better for sure". Maybe something is lost in translation? It just means "This could use improvement".

Fair enough!

I read "could be better for sure" together with the whole "but" that came after it - meaning even though it could be better, it's not so bad because it averages 11.

"Earning sick leave" is some dystopian bullshit. If you are sick, don't go into work. You don't need to earn it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com