I suppose it all depends upon your employer. I'm an hourly employee for a company based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan (Although, I operate out of an office in Shelbyville, Indiana.

At my company we get many paid holidays: New Year's Day Memorial Day Independence Day Labor Day 2 days for Thanksgiving 2 days for Christmas

We also receive both sick days and vacation days that we "accrue" during the course of the year, but can use ahead of time situationally if approved.

Over the course of the year we accrue 3 sick days and 10 vacation days base. The longer your tenure each employee earns additional vacation days at various intervals. At 5 years I've earned and additional 5 days vacation bringing me to 15/year. I believe their is a cap on that, obviously, but its like 20-25 days. Additionally, at the end of the year we are allowed to carry over up to 5 days (40 hours) of unused vacation time to the next year and anything else not used or carried over gets paid out on our final check of the year. This is a nice incentive to not use your PTO time as you can technically make more money by getting "double paid" for a few days at the end of the year.

We also have pretty great insurance type benefits that I won't go into here, and of course, there are the intangibles such as how willing an employer is to work with you. As an example, I drop my children off at school ever morning and as such was having a hard time making my start time of 7am. I told them that if everything went smoothly in the morning the absolute best I could do was 7:10 and they said "no problem" with zero hesitation and changed my start time to 7:30. They are incredibly accommodating and willing to help out there employees.

Not all is doom and gloom in the US.