| Thursday, August 14, 2008 |
| Stockholm Diary #10: Vacation |
The signs in the window say: "Vacation Again. Back Aug. 11 or 18, depending on the weather. Be careful with ticks, mosquitoes and gin & tonic."
When I was planning this trip, I took it for granted that it would not be a month's vacation. For one thing, Joe doesn't have enough days off, and for another, my business is a one-woman show and it could be fatal to tell my clients that I'd be incommunicado for all of August.
Joe's company is rather rare and special in that it offers employees a 5-week sabbatical every 5 years; longtime readers of this blog will remember my reports from the Southwest in 2006 as we drove around Arizona and New Mexico. (I, of course, brought a laptop along and worked along the way.) Since most companies don't offer this perk, we felt extremely lucky to have the opportunity to take advantage of it. However, if we lived in Sweden, a monthlong vacation wouldn't be a special, every-5-years kind of thing for people lucky enough to work at a particularly generous company. It would be an annual event.
That's right -- Swedes get a legally mandated 32 days off every year. Doesn't matter whether you're sweeping floors for a living or the CEO. A lot of Swedes go to the countryside for the entire month of July, and sometimes into August, which is why you see so many signs in businesses all over Stockholm telling you a certain shop is semesterstÃĪngt.
Sign reads: "Geco is closed for the summer, July 14-Aug. 11. Have a good summer."
In the U.S., a lot of people don't even use their paltry vacation days because, in some cases, the corporate culture frowns on taking days off, while others are afraid that if they leave their desk for too long, somone will realize they're not indispensable and the ax will fall. That attitude just doesn't exist here. People assume that vacation is good for you, and by extension, good for business.
If I lived here, it would be awfully tempting to give up self-employment so I could enjoy those guilt-free five weeks off every year. |
posted by 125records @ 9:59 AM  |
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| 3 Comments: |
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When I lived in German, more shocking to me than the whole "Europeans get a month of vacation" thing was its natural upshot: that, as your pictures prove, entire stores just shut down for weeks at a time. I lived more or less across the street from a popular fries-and-sausage stand that always had huge lines at lunch time; one day in July, a handwritten sign that just said "Wir machen uhrlaub" ("We're on vacation") appeared, and they didn't open again for three weeks. I feel like Americans would be so disgusted by a restaurant that simply shot down that they'd break their habits and just give up on the place, but the lines were just as long three weeks later when they reopened.
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I make sure I take all fifteen of my days. My wife is a teacher with ten weeks off each summer so I can't keep up.
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I get four weeks, plus a couple of comp days and trying to schedule them is always murder. So far this year, how much have I used? Exactly one day. But my editor managed to take a week off in July and more than half the month of August off. The problem is that there can only be so many people out at any given time (since we are perilously short-staffed) so trying to coordinate everyone's time off becomes a hell of a headache for everyone. Frankly, most years, I'd rather take half the time and cash in the rest of the days. But we're not allowed to do that.
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When I lived in German, more shocking to me than the whole "Europeans get a month of vacation" thing was its natural upshot: that, as your pictures prove, entire stores just shut down for weeks at a time. I lived more or less across the street from a popular fries-and-sausage stand that always had huge lines at lunch time; one day in July, a handwritten sign that just said "Wir machen uhrlaub" ("We're on vacation") appeared, and they didn't open again for three weeks. I feel like Americans would be so disgusted by a restaurant that simply shot down that they'd break their habits and just give up on the place, but the lines were just as long three weeks later when they reopened.