Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296
in many European countries vacation is by law on top of your salary, so you're still getting your normal paycheck when you're on vacation.
That's a financially unsophisticated view. In such cases the salary always includes the vacation in so far as it's lower than it otherwise would be were the vacation not required by law to be part of the total compensation. A cost to a company is still a cost. It doesn't matter that half the cost is due to salary and half the cost is due to the otherwise salaried employee being unavailable to work because he's on vacation. It's the total cost that matters and the vacation must be a non-zero part of that. I'd rather be free to negotiate my own preferred kind and amount of compensation, whether it be through vacation time or more money (I prefer money), than have the government force me to spend a mandatory minimum share of my compensation on vacation, whether I would chose to "purchase" that much vacation on my own or not.