

List of statutory minimum employment leave by country - Ras_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country

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duncan_bayne
USA has 'none' ... which seems right, as I can't recall the Constitution
authorising the Federal Government to mandate employment leave.

~~~
jdietrich
I'm British, so please tolerate my ignorance for a moment.

If I understand US law correctly, the constitution can be amended at will,
through a process not exceptionally arduous - certainly more difficult than
passing ordinary legislation, but not exceptionally so. Many other federal
states have similarly strict requirements when passing federal legislation,
but have gone as far as to rewrite their constitutions from scratch.

If my understanding is correct, then what explains the US Constitution's
position in political culture and discourse? I have been given the strong
impression that the Constitution is regarded in many quarters as an immutable
guarantee of basic freedoms or a fixed check on the powers of the state, but
on a practical level it seems to be no such thing. There is a strong rhetoric
in many quarters that if something is allowed or prohibited by the
constitution then it is irrevocably and permanently allowed or prohibited, but
the history of the document seems to contradict that.

The eighteenth amendment was repealed, why not the tenth? If the sixteenth
amendment empowered the federal government to collect taxes directly, what
would preclude a twenty-eighth amendment from allowing it to impose basic
rights for employees?

It is my understanding that there is a federal minimum wage. Is this
unconstitutional? If so, what real political significance does the
constitution hold if it is so freely disregarded?

Apologies to all for the barrage of questions, but I have done a reasonable
amount of reading on the subject and am genuinely baffled by the almost
mythical nature of the US constitution and the apparent gulf between
perception and reality.

~~~
Zak
The constitutionality of a Federal minimum wage is questionable. It was ruled
unconstitutional in the 1930s along with a number of other expansions of
Federal authority, however, the president and congress threatened to increase
the size of the supreme court and add enough sympathetic justices to allow the
replacement legislation to stand.

Changing the Constitution is intended to be hard. I want my elected
representatives to be much more reluctant to change what the government is
allowed to do than to change how it does the things it's already allowed to
do. I especially want a list of things the government is not allowed to do to
me, and I want it to be extraordinarily difficult to remove items from that
list.

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ajju
Something else that puts this information in context is the number of public
holidays and length of the workweek. Most white collar jobs in the U.S. are 5
days a week in the U.S. but 6 days a week in India, for example. Conversely,
India has an amazing number of public holidays
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_India> (although most
employers will give only a subset of these off).

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dalys
Also, there's something strange with the USA row in this wikipedia article
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave>

