

The Price of Paid Vacation - cwan
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/the-price-of-paid-vacation/

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csmeder
Forget productivity, I see it as humanity. I would rather be paid less an hour
if it was made up with PTO days. Maybe don't make paid vacation mandatory but
make it mandatory that employees can trade $ per hour for paid vacation. Or at
the very least make it mandatory that employees are by law allowed to take up
to 1 month off unpaid.

I think letting employees have some time off is a good thing for both the
employee and society.

~~~
patio11
I recommend self-employment. You get all the unpaid time off you want! (And,
if you're selling software, it is "unpaid" for a very curious value of
"unpaid" in which your bank account actually does get fatter on a daily
basis.)

Mandating any form of compensation transfers wealth from people who would not
choose to avail themselves of that compensation to people who would. I tend to
think these transfers are generally unwise and/or unfair, and would prefer to
leave them up to negotiation among the parties.

For example, "You can have up to a month off" has real costs for the business.
Consider what it does at companies with one owner and one employee, for
illustration: the business is mandated by law to virtually shutter itself one
month out of the year. It is cheaper to have redundancy in large corporations
where everyone is a cog, but it is not free. To the extent it is not free,
that cost is implicitly tied to workers, and it competes against other forms
of compensation, such as wages, _regardless_ of whether they choose to
exercise their vacation options or not.

One could easily imagine a situation in which workers -- say, young single
workers -- would prefer wages, or flex time, or "all you can eat Amazon books"
over the unexercized option to be single and bored at home.

(Though I'll grant there is one nice bit about everybody having vacation time:
it alleviates a bit of a collective action problem, since time off when your
friends/family have to work has shockingly lower utility than time off when
they do not.)

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sqrt17
I think the logic is simple: Both workers and employers underestimate the
impact that not taking a vacation has on productivity. Forcing them to gain
the productivity gains that come through the vacation raises the overall
efficiency.

(On the other hand, if people get more vacation _and_ spend half of their day
playing Solitaire, that's not a winning proposition.)

~~~
temphn
> Forcing them

It's not a good idea to force someone else to do something you _think_ is good
for them, because:

(a) they have a right to do what they want

(b) you could well be wrong

(c) and you would not like them forcing you to do things for your own good

In this case, the belief that "vacations increase productivity" is one of
those comfortingly counterintuitive Gladwellian nostrums that collapses under
close examination.

Counterintuitive: "But vacation means working less, so how could it mean more
productivity? Ah, the vacation increases efficiency during working hours to
such an extent that the integral of efficiency over time is greater!"

Collapsing under close examination: "Clearly increasing the vacation
proportion p to 1.0 would push the working hours (1-p) to zero, reducing
integrated efficiency to zero. Thus if an effect exists[1], it would have (at
least one) local maximum between 0 < p < 1\. And it is not obvious what side
of this local maximum we are on, nor whether the location of that local
maximum is constant from industry to industry & person to person.

Hence it is not at all obvious that forcibly increasing vacation time would
raise the overall efficiency. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the claim
holds in anything like the asserted generality."

QED

[1] To be precise, by postulating that an effect exists, we are stipulating
that there exists a p' such that E(p') > E(0), as the efficiency is (supposed
to be) greater at that p=p' than at p=0. We also note that no matter how large
E(p), the integral of it over time at p = 1 is zero as there are no hours
worked. These two observations mean that the integrated productivity is
increasing at the beginning & decreasing at the end. The classic such smooth
function is a parabola; there may be multiple wiggles depending on exactly how
efficiency evolves with productivity.

~~~
j1o1h1n
> they have a right to do what they want

The first thing the auditors do is go through the HR records, find out who
hasn't taken off any vacation time or sick leave for three years. That person
is raising purchase orders and signing and counter-signing the approval forms
or otherwise doing something so Byzantine that if they leave it for a single
day, it will come crashing down on them...

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reedlaw
It seems to me that work hours, vacation, and pay are some of the few things
that are really negotiable before accepting a job offer. What if each person
simply negotiated for themselves how much vacation time they felt is
reasonable, along with a salary adjusted to the amount of work they plan to
do?

~~~
gamble
Extra vacation time is much harder to negotiate than the equivalent bump in
salary. Vacation is more visible than salary, and people who want more time
off than their coworkers are perceived as slackers or 'not a team player'.
Plus, many companies link vacation allotment to seniority, so asking for more
vacation threatens their primary reward for loyalty.

