> It works out for any worker

The crazily bad working conditions for the lower end of the US labour market tells me differently.

> At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally. These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).

Which misses my point, which is that while this may be true, the low number of people who take up the opportunity to negotiate compensation to give up vacation days etc. demonstrate quite clearly that workers here tend to value this more than employers do.

In most parts of Europe these laws set defaults. Some make it more difficult to deviate from the default than others (Norway is notoriously hard; many contract clauses are automatically null and void unless you're very careful), but most places you can deviate from most or all of them through negotiation and various degrees of creative solutions (in Norway too, mostly). Yet my experience is that most people don't.

If any employer came to me and offered to buy back a vacation day, they could do that. If they offer enough, I might take it. To date no employer has offered me enough for it to worth it, but some have provided programmes where they offered flexible numbers of vacation days, with a default.

I'm arguing that employers value those extra days at less than most workers do, or more employers would offer to buy back vacation days or offer such flexible vacation day schemes (when they do it tends to be seen as a way to get more vacation; only rarely is it seen as a way to get more money, though occasionally people "sell" vacation days one year to be able to buy more days the following year).

In fact, in many places in Europe the norm is now to offer more paid vacation days than the statutory minimum. e.g. in the UK the minimum is 28 days which can include the 8 public holidays, but the norm in professional employment is a minimum of 25 days + the 8 public holidays, and many places this will increase with tenure, in recognition of the fact that employees tend to value this higher than the equivalent increase in salary (we see this demonstrated in that for example many notoriously low paid jobs, such as in retail, often have above average number of paid vacation days - it is "cheaper" for these extremely cost-sensitive companies to offer more vacation than to increase salary by amounts that would have been valued equally high by their potential employees)

> I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed in the first place.

And I pointed out that this effect is easy enough to counteract, and that you can give far more women the ability to choose to continue to work by offering better childcare provisions. To the extent that in a lot of countries, childcare provisioning has been a large part of the fight for womens rights (because it is usually women that ends up pushed out of the workplace when couples can't afford to have both people working)

> Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions:

... as a proxy because they've been unable to get government to increase pensions directly. Most places workplace pensions represent basically a political defeat, and given the right wing nature of Israeli politics I'm not surprised.

> It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?

Which is a very, very different situation. There are good reasons for bureaucracy: Employers show time and time again that they want to fire for reasons that have nothing to do with work performance.

> The bottom line is that if it's difficult to fire someone, you'll be a lot more picky and careful before hiring them.

Doesn't sound like a bad thing for either side to me. That said, in most European countries there are special provisions that make it a lot easier to fire someone during an initial 6 or 12 month trial period.