THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 23, 1996 TAG: 9607230351
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 72 lines
Employees of Volvo Penta in Chesapeake can't phone their home office in Sweden this month. It seems the folks at AB Volvo headquarters in Sweden have taken July off.
The month off? That's nothing compared to German workers, who average six weeks of vacation a year.
Yes, it's summer, and many Americans have already squandered half or all of their scant two weeks of vacation - a bleak reminder of how good some Europeans have it.
But maybe there's hope.
With all the foreign-headquartered companies that have set up shop in the United States in the past 25 years, perhaps some of their generous vacation policies will seep into the company handbooks of their U.S. divisions.
Or maybe not.
Benefits policies don't seem to cross the ocean as easily as foreign companies do. Vacation, sick days, maternity leave and other benefits of foreign companies tend to reflect the culture of the country in which a particular operation is set up.
``I guess it's like that old saying, `When in Rome . . . ,' '' says Joan Richards, human resources manager at Volvo Penta.
Because Volvo's corporate headquarters shuts down in the heart of European vacation season, the company sets up special service offices in the Mediterranean ``to handle the July outage,'' says Scott Watkins, spokesman for Volvo Penta.
That's prime boating season in Europe as well as in the United States, and some of Volvo Penta's boat engines might need service.
``You can't shut down the Mediterranean because all these people in Sweden are taking July off,'' Watkins said. ``Most of the other employees in Europe are also taking these long vacations and where do they go? To the Mediterranean to go boating.''
Stihl Inc. in Virginia Beach offers a vacation policy that is ``a little bit more generous'' than most companies, said Monica Mills, human-resources director of the German-owned company. Stihl's hourly employees get three weeks of vacation after working for the company for five years.
Yet that pales compared to the six weeks a worker gets at Stihl's plant in Waiblingen, Germany.
``This time of year, there's always an article or two that say, `Gee whiz, the Europeans have so much vacation time,' '' says Ken McDonnell, research analyst at the Employee Benefit Research Institute in Washington.
``Well, the Europeans have a much higher unemployment rate, and part of that is the higher cost of benefits.''
Those higher nonwage costs are one of the reasons Stihl and other foreign-headquartered companies have shifted more work to their U.S. operations.
In 1994, the average employee at Stihl's German manufacturing plants worked 1,271 hours during the year. At the Virginia Beach plant, the average employee worked nearly 500 more.
In Europe, some governments mandate up to four weeks of vacation per year, and it is not unheard of for individual companies to add to that. But instead of outfits in the United States getting more vacation, McDonnell points out that some experts think the Europeans will have to trim their leisure time in order to become more competitive.
And U.S. companies, in order to compete with each other for good workers, may have to sweeten their offerings.
After all, one of the more generous paid-leave policies in Hampton Roads can be found at a company headquartered in Japan, one of the few industrialized countries whose employees work more hours yearly than in the United States.
Canon Virginia Inc. in Newport News provides 32 days of paid annual leave - and more than that if the employee has been there longer than five years. That includes 12 paid holidays and any sick time the worker needs.
It's not up there with German vacations, but not many U.S. companies meet that standard, either. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/The Virginian-Pilot by CNB