Employee Rights
Paid Time Off
The average work week is noticeably shorter in Europe than in the United States. Europe’s legal average working week is 35 hours. A normal working day may not exceed 10 hours. The United States doesn’t have a legally defined limit on the hours an employee can work in a week. The U.S. does define a employer can work employees up to 40 hours a week, anything up and over this the employer must pay them one and one-half times their regular pay. One reason for the difference is that workers in the United States are less likely to receive paid time off, and those U.S. workers that do receive paid time off usually receive far less than their counterparts in comparable countries. The United States is the only country that does not legally require employers to provide paid leave. Of course many employers in the USA offer some or all of their employees with some type of paid leave. The only exceptions are for government contractors and subcontractors covered under the Davis-Bacon Act. Almost every developed country has established legal rights to receive paid leave for their employees. United States law offers no statutory paid leave.
The European Union and other European countries have established that is a legal right for employees to have least 20 days of paid leave per year, with the legal requirement of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Some European countries even have regulations on the timing of leave to guarantee that employees are able to take some of their paid leave in the summer peak vacation season. The average United States employee has about an average of about nine days of paid leave per year, plus about six paid public holidays. Several European countries also offer additional leave for personal events such as moving in to a new