 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Daniel Rosal, and if it's your first time here, I publish videos about different aspects of living in Israel. Today I wanted to share a little bit about how the work week is structured in Israel, because to the surprise of some, it's actually a little bit different than many other countries in the world. The most distinctive fact about the work week in Israel is that it's a Sunday to Thursday work week. Needless to say, this has two implications. Let's start with the positive. Israelis have every Friday off work, and at the negative, every single Sunday in Israel is a regular work day. While this work week might sound highly unusual, there are actually a few other countries in the world that differ from the classic 9 to 5 Monday through Friday work week that is the staple of office life in the Western world. Wikipedia has an excellent resource showing how the working week is organized around the world. The wiki is called Work Week and Weekend, and I'll leave a link to it in the description. According to that page, Egypt, Afghanistan, Algeria, Qatar, and parts of Malaysia also follow this structure. In Israel's case, the work week has to do with preserving Saturday the Sabbath or in Hebrew Shabbat as the Jewish day of rest. Israel is of course the only Jewish country in the world, and a substantial part of the population observes the laws of Shabbat which forbid working on Saturday. Of course, there are people in Israel who work a 6 day work week, Sunday through Friday, and although it's very uncommon, I've even known a few friends who managed to get permission from their companies to work a Monday to Friday schedule. These friends were working in sales positions interfacing with customers in the US, so the work week probably made sense to their employers, but it's very much not the standard. The standard office work week in Israel is something like 9 to 6 Sunday through Thursday, and this is a kind of working schedule that you'll find most technology companies like startups offering to their workers. When it comes to vacation time, Israel isn't exactly the most generous of countries. Wikipedia has another excellent page which shows the minimum number of vacation days which each country guarantees to full-time workers. While people commonly cite the US as a point of comparison, especially in Israel for some reason, in my opinion this is a faulty one. The US may have no guaranteed leave at the federal level, but like the IRS policy of requiring its overseas citizens to report on their taxes, this makes the country very much an outlier among the world's nations. While Israel only guarantees 12 days annual leave to full-time workers, the EU sets a minimum annual leave of 27 days which member states must abide by. Bahrain, oddly enough, has the world's most generous time off allowance. In 2019, the state raised its vacation allowance from 30 days to a whopping 49 per year. Personally, I think Israel should be taking a leave from their playbook and not the one of the US. Jewish holidays are offered as national holidays in Israel, however because of the fact that Israel has a strongly religious character, much of the country is shut down on these days and public transport generally doesn't run. An exception to this is Israel's national holiday which is called in Hebrew, Yom Haatz Ma'ut. The Friday-Saturday weekend is somewhat controversial in Israel due to the fact that religious Jews abstain from using electricity on the Shabbat which runs from approximately sundown on Friday through to the same time on Saturday. Public transport, as I've mentioned, also doesn't run. In effect, this means that religious Jews only have one day per week which is neither a work day nor a day on which they are bound by the laws of the Shabbats. Over the years, there have been proposals to add a few Sundays per year as days off in order to allow observing Jews to have a little bit more contiguous time off during which they can get out and about. Unfortunately, these proposals have generally been met with resistance by trade union bosses who fear that the extra days off would result in a slowdown in national productivity. Of course, the success of many four-day working week experiments currently taking place throughout the world really contradicts this idea and presenteeism is, in my experience at least, a pretty common feature in Israeli workplaces. Although I've tried to make this video informative, you can probably feel my opinion coming through a little here. I think that the work week in Israel is too long and there aren't enough safeguards in place to guarantee a minimum level of vacation for employees. However, in practice, it's worth pointing out that many Israeli workers do get a lot more than the 12 days of law guarantees and added vacation days are typically accrued as one gains seniority in a company. And just as you can barter for bananas and avocados in Israel, your annual paid time off allowance is very much something that it's reasonable to negotiate over before you accept a new job in Israel. I hope this video has been informative, please do consider subscribing and liking for more updates.