I lost the link to this article but the following is interesting and I'm all up for more paid time off. Let's call it sharing the love with the employees....I guess we aren't as smart as we thought we were.......
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The average Canadian worked 1,751 hours in 2004. That's about 300 hours — or 43 seven-hour days — more than the Dutch, Germans, French or Danes.

European societies are at one end of the spectrum while Canada, the United States, Australia and Japan are at the other.

Magnus Schonning offers an interesting perspective. The 38-year-old Swede has been working at his country's embassy in Ottawa for four years. He gets 42 days of vacation annually, which includes a 10-day bonus for working abroad.

"I can't take it all," Schonning said, adding that he is banking much of it so he can take an extended vacation before he moves to his next posting.

As a father of two children, he also gets as much as a year off, at 80 per cent pay, per youngster.

Though the mother and father decide how to divvy up the time, dad must take at least two months off work per child.

"We work to live, and not live to work, Schonning explained.

Sweden's very high productivity levels — it boasts the highest ratio of industrial robots in the world — allow the society to value leisure time, Schonning said.

Based on total economic output, adjusted by population and purchasing power, Canada's gross domestic product is very similar to that of many European countries, and below some.

The Irish, for example, work 6 per cent fewer hours, on average, yet the economic output per person beats ours by 14 per cent.

Most Canadian provinces require employers to provide only two weeks of vacation per year.

Canada could easily add another week to the minimum holiday times and the economy would not collapse, said Ron Burke, professor of organizational behaviour at York University.

"Canadians could actually work fewer hours and it wouldn't make much of a dent in our GDP. And you'd have healthier workers."

One of Burke's daughters, working for a large German industrial firm in Munich, got six weeks of vacation her first year.

Long working hours not only fail to promote efficiency, but may also increase the likelihood of people making mistakes, Burke said. Long workdays "may be in the short-term interest of a shareholder or company president, but it is definitely not in the long-term interest of most Canadians."

Powerful unions deserve much of the credit for bringing down average working hours in Europe, whereas the union movement in Canada and the United States is waning, Burke said.

Surprisingly, reducing working hours was never a top priority for North American unions anyway, said Andrew Jackson, an economist with the Canadian Labour Congress. Still, when unions did manage to shorten workdays, negotiators fiercely resisted employers' subsequent efforts to claw back those gains.

"Once people have experienced a reduction in hours, they don't want to go back."

For Canadian society in general, the last big cut in working hours came 50 years ago, when Canada cut the work week to five days from six, Jackson said.

Back then, the business community warned the economy would collapse as a result, and the same bogus arguments are being made today, Jackson said.
"Economists have found that every significant step that was taken to reduce working time was accompanied by a sharp increase in productivity."

Canadians' willingness to work longer hours than Europeans is ingrained in our culture, concludes Michael Huberman, an economics professor at the University of Montreal.

Europeans, in fact, have always valued leisure time more than people in the rest of the world, Huberman said.

His research shows the differences are cultural and were enshrined well before such issues as marginal tax rates, unions or unemployment insurance benefits became factors.

"These work patterns have visible for a long time, way before modern welfare states."

A century ago, Canadians were much more wealthy on average than Europeans.

"If you are earning a lot more money, simple labour-supply theory tells me you should be taking more leisure, and they did not," Huberman said.

One possible explanation is education.

"We know that societies that are more educated work less," Huberman said.

Will Canadians or Americans ever start working less? The past 25 years suggest not.

Between 1980 and 2000, European countries added, on average, six vacation days or statutory holidays, totalling 36 per year.

Meanwhile, according to Huberman's numbers, Canada actually dropped a day, to 24, while the United States lost two days, to 20 days off.