What do you think about legally mandated paid vacation?

In Ireland we have 20 days guaranteed paid holidays plus nine public holidays. On mainland Europe they have more.





There was an article in the Irish Times today stating that the US is the only Western country not to have legally mandated paid leave?





Why do you think this is? and what is your position on have legally mandated paid vacation?|||In America we can only dream about such benifits|||I think our country makes a whole lot more money than yours, considering everyone in it works an extra 20 days at LEAST than you guys do.





Is that good? Depends. You guys are paying for those extra holidays, I hope you know that. A company is not going to just take a 4 week loss, it is going to pass that on to the consumers.





In other words, everything you guys buy is (4/52=) 7.7% higher. That's like adding a 8% sales tax on EVERYTHING. It's nice, but that is pretty expensive.|||As far as I'm concerned, vacation should be earned, not mandated. I don't care what your job is, if you do not earn time off you should not receive time off. There is a reason our country outproduces almost every other country and that's because we work hard. We make good products and we take pride in that. Its the people who are afraid of work, or who are generally not successful enough to take a vacation that are clammoring for this. And my advice to these people is to work harder and work smarter. Because we don't need government mandated vacation to slow the productivity of this country.