[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by clintjm

In my company they do because their offices are closed.
My realitives are off as well.
You must know a lot of people. I'm glad you can speak for the nation.
Japan and the US are almost at equal in hours per week.

And my relatives` company has zero days off a year - they even go in for half a day on New Years.
Of course I don`t speak for a whole country, but neither do you. REPORTED days off are different than ACTUAL days off.

Well if you are salaried you've already sold your soul to the company and there is no "overtime". So the without pay thing is mute.

I would LOVE to know how this misconception pops up all the time.
You are salaried for 8 hours work a day and a 1 hour break for every workday in a month. You will get the same base salary regardless of the number of work days in each month. Depending on the company, some include Saturday as a work day, some do not.
Anything beyond that is overtime, and by law you are required to be paid overtime pay. Being salaried has nothing to do with whether you receive overtime. Do companies try to get around this by offering other things instead of overtime pay? Yes. Do companies illegally ask people to work without paying them overtime? Yes. But those are illegal practices and can be reported.

I guess that is why travel is so pleasant on Golden week because everyone isn't off. I suppose it depends on what the job is.... I mean if stuff is closed, stuff is closed and little can be done from coming in to work. It all depends on what we are talking about... I mean transportation industry and mass retail never sleeps....

This is sort of like saying that no one is off on Christmas in the US. Of course there are going to be holidays the majority of people DO take off - that doesn`t reflect on the whole of days taken off over a whole year.

Look I'm just going with stats... working for an international company as a comparison, relatives, friends, having worked and studied there myself. There are plenty of Japanese and American reports on this. Frankly neither of which make Japan or the U.S. the happiest country on the planet. I'm saying the Japanese system continues to work hard as the U.S. does, but if you look at it... the U.S. is coming apart at the seams with no guarenteed vacation and 5-6 days of national holidays.

I think what I am trying to point out is that stats alone do not reflect reality. The government can say that a company HAS to provide so many days off a year and put a law in place saying this, with fines for companies that do not follow it and tax breaks for companies that do. When the government goes around to the tops of companies with a survey asking them how many days off they gave their workers that year - with all the reporting being in-company... How many places do you think are going to say they didn`t give everyone all the days? And this is the info being used to form charts...