Forget productivity, I see it as humanity. I would rather be paid less an hour if it was made up with PTO days. Maybe don't make paid vacation mandatory but make it mandatory that employees can trade $ per hour for paid vacation. Or at the very least make it mandatory that employees are by law allowed to take up to 1 month off unpaid.
I think letting employees have some time off is a good thing for both the employee and society.
I recommend self-employment. You get all the unpaid time off you want! (And, if you're selling software, it is "unpaid" for a very curious value of "unpaid" in which your bank account actually does get fatter on a daily basis.)
Mandating any form of compensation transfers wealth from people who would not choose to avail themselves of that compensation to people who would. I tend to think these transfers are generally unwise and/or unfair, and would prefer to leave them up to negotiation among the parties.
For example, "You can have up to a month off" has real costs for the business. Consider what it does at companies with one owner and one employee, for illustration: the business is mandated by law to virtually shutter itself one month out of the year. It is cheaper to have redundancy in large corporations where everyone is a cog, but it is not free. To the extent it is not free, that cost is implicitly tied to workers, and it competes against other forms of compensation, such as wages, regardless of whether they choose to exercise their vacation options or not.
One could easily imagine a situation in which workers -- say, young single workers -- would prefer wages, or flex time, or "all you can eat Amazon books" over the unexercized option to be single and bored at home.
(Though I'll grant there is one nice bit about everybody having vacation time: it alleviates a bit of a collective action problem, since time off when your friends/family have to work has shockingly lower utility than time off when they do not.)
I would rather be paid less an hour if it was made up with PTO days
Part of the point of the article was that this is what happens. Your work is worth a certain amount for which you are getting paid, regardless of how it is amortized over a time period with or without PTO. If more PTO is mandated, it will necessitate a decrease in pay. The exception would be the unlikely result of people's productivity improving to counteract the loss of value caused by the extra time off.
I think the logic is simple: Both workers and employers underestimate the impact that not taking a vacation has on productivity. Forcing them to gain the productivity gains that come through the vacation raises the overall efficiency.
(On the other hand, if people get more vacation and spend half of their day playing Solitaire, that's not a winning proposition.)
It's not a good idea to force someone else to do something you think is good for them, because:
(a) they have a right to do what they want
(b) you could well be wrong
(c) and you would not like them forcing you to do things for your own good
In this case, the belief that "vacations increase productivity" is one of those comfortingly counterintuitive Gladwellian nostrums that collapses under close examination.
Counterintuitive: "But vacation means working less, so how could it mean more productivity? Ah, the vacation increases efficiency during working hours to such an extent that the integral of efficiency over time is greater!"
Collapsing under close examination: "Clearly increasing the vacation proportion p to 1.0 would push the working hours (1-p) to zero, reducing integrated efficiency to zero. Thus if an effect exists[1], it would have (at least one) local maximum between 0 < p < 1. And it is not obvious what side of this local maximum we are on, nor whether the location of that local maximum is constant from industry to industry & person to person.
Hence it is not at all obvious that forcibly increasing vacation time would raise the overall efficiency. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the claim holds in anything like the asserted generality."
QED
[1] To be precise, by postulating that an effect exists, we are stipulating that there exists a p' such that E(p') > E(0), as the efficiency is (supposed to be) greater at that p=p' than at p=0. We also note that no matter how large E(p), the integral of it over time at p = 1 is zero as there are no hours worked. These two observations mean that the integrated productivity is increasing at the beginning & decreasing at the end. The classic such smooth function is a parabola; there may be multiple wiggles depending on exactly how efficiency evolves with productivity.
The first thing the auditors do is go through the HR records, find out who hasn't taken off any vacation time or sick leave for three years. That person is raising purchase orders and signing and counter-signing the approval forms or otherwise doing something so Byzantine that if they leave it for a single day, it will come crashing down on them...
I find I'm most productive if I work for 6-8 weeks, then have a week off, then another 6-8 weeks, etc. It helps clears the mental grogginess that builds up and kills my productivity. So that's about 5-8 weeks a year (but they have to be evenly distributed).
No one (so far as I know) is claiming that it's obvious that taking more vacations (than is normal in the US) increases productivity; only that it's true. Your argument is entirely devoted to demonstrating that it's not obvious, and has nothing to say about whether it's true.
(Is it true? I don't know, though it seems very plausible to me. It's certainly commonly said, and really not all that counterintuitive.)
It seems to me that work hours, vacation, and pay are some of the few things that are really negotiable before accepting a job offer. What if each person simply negotiated for themselves how much vacation time they felt is reasonable, along with a salary adjusted to the amount of work they plan to do?
Extra vacation time is much harder to negotiate than the equivalent bump in salary. Vacation is more visible than salary, and people who want more time off than their coworkers are perceived as slackers or 'not a team player'. Plus, many companies link vacation allotment to seniority, so asking for more vacation threatens their primary reward for loyalty.
That would be fine, except that in typical job negotiations there is a severe imbalance in negotiating power. Companies like to treat all their employees equally, and (almost) no vacation is easiest for them, so that is what one ends up with.
The same argument explains the need for some regulation of the maximum working hours/day, lunch breaks, etc.
I think letting employees have some time off is a good thing for both the employee and society.