Trade union membership and paid vacation in Germany

Abstract

In Germany, dependent employees take almost 30 days of paid vacation annually. We enquire whether an individual's trade union membership affects the duration of vacation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1985 to 2010 and employing pooled OLS-estimators, we find that being a union member goes along with almost one additional day of vacation per year. Estimations exploiting the panel structure of our data suggest that a smaller part of this vacation differential can be due to the union membership status, while self-selection effects play a more important role. JEL Classifications: J 22; J 33; J 51; J 81

What Determines Vacation Leave? The Role of Gender

“…It is worth mentioning that Goerke et al . () did not find significant results for the effects of education on paid vacation in Germany for both men and women.…”

“…Interestingly, the estimates underline positive association between employee age and VP only for men, meaning that older workers receive more vacation leave than young workers. These results are in line with previous studies on vacation leave (Maume, ; Altonji and Usui, ; Fakih, ; Goerke et al ., ). Fakih () argues that married workers have more family tasks that lead them to use their vacation leave more often.…”

“…The results reveal that VP and VT increase with seniority for both men and women, suggesting that with seniority, employees’ perception level of a long record of service may provide an incentive for hard work, and a way for workers to improve their job positions. This finding is reminiscent of the results reported through several empirical studies on vacation leave (Maume, ; Altonji and Usui, ; Fakih, ; Goerke et al ., ). Similarly, Maume () notes that tenure can be seen as a measure of the value that workers attribute to the employer.…”

“…Finally, Goerke et al . () use the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1985 to 2010 to study the relationships between trade union membership and paid vacation offered. Using pooled OLS, they find that being unionized increases the amount of paid vacation by around one additional day per year compared to non‐unionized workers.…”

“…Using a linked employee‐employer dataset, the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), we investigate the extent to which worker, job and workplace characteristics explain the days of paid vacation offered, vacation used, and vacation unused. This paper adds to the growing empirical literature on vacation leave (Maume, ; Altonji and Usui, ; Fakih, ; Goerke et al ., ) by focusing on the role of gender in understanding the determinants of vacation time in Canada. This is important because the relative weight workers allocate for leisure time might differ across gender leading to different use of vacation time between men and women.…”