It comes out of everyone's entitlement, regardless of what job you do.
Most jobs will be 24 days annual leave + 8 days bank holidays, or 32 days annual leave. It's the same difference.
Its just it's hard for non-shift workers to get their heads around sometimes
Yup. I get no choice as to when to take my bank holidays! I have the luxury of saving three days' holiday between Christmas and New Year to have them elsewhen, but the NHS doesn't sleep over the holiday season so there needs to be at least a skeleton crew to handle patient care and administrative urgencies (I.e. someone to call in an emergency plumber when an inpatient ward toilet backs up on Christmas Day, and the procurement system needs a PO raised)..
My boss was very keen to point out that pre-planned maintenance has to go ahead and get done to the same standard in December as in any other month. No rest for the wicked. But I still think that in the culture we have full holidays for a reason -- partly to do with cultural attachments (Good Friday is one example of a holiday that has been honoured in England for time immemorial and even in a secular society is taken so much for granted that trying to liquidate it would probably provoke a huge backlash; Cromwell tried to abolish Christmas and just drove it underground) and partly to do with the need for collective as well as individual holidays. (I note my very educationally orientated family have planned something for 3 January, whereby everyone will be there except me. Because I don't work in education, 3 January is not just an ordinary day at the office, but the date of some important meetings that would have fallen over the Christmas period but for there not being a quorum of people around. Annoyingly, the host is also doing something on the Saturday, meaning that we couldn't just shift it a day so I could be there.)
As for the continent, retail in the more traditional parts of town when I lived in Lodz, Poland, small shops shut at lunchtime on Saturday. The main newer shops and shopping centres stayed open, and the only difference for a delicatessen I lived above was that they shut at 10pm on a Sunday rather than 11pm, but there was a fairly robust approach to more traditional hours in certain sectors. On public holidays such as the traditional All Hallows and Constitution Day (which often turned into a week's holiday because 1 May was still observed and thus people tended to shut down even in retail) everything shut, and by that I mean everything. I went to Czechia on those days/weeks since they had different holidays.
As for a two week shutdown, that wouldn't work with our lifestyles. The manufacturing industry could shut down, but providers in the leisure industry would be working full tilt. Unless everyone goes abroad, retail and other services catering to the masses on holiday would still have to work. The long shutdowns on the continent that those people brag about...I wonder how many of those with massive allotments at a particular time are office workers who still depend on service providers, retail etc who presumably can't join them on their extended jollies. Just like mass WFH created a bit of a two-tier system in the workforce, with luxuries given to the better off that the often lower-paid service delivery teams couldn't partake in, I suspect that has had an impact on perceived equalities.
I'm probably arguing at cross purposes here -- on the one hand I'm saying not everyone is shut over holidays and on the other I'm saying that other countries do have their shutdowns -- but generally speaking I like to look at both sides of the issue and achieve a compromise position based on the facts. But it still remains that the English approach isn't completely unusual in Europe to have shutdowns for at least some of the population, and that an American style holiday calendar with nothing necessarily guaranteed off and people allowed to ride the rails at the expense of someone else's Christmas wouldn't necessarily be embraced by an awful lot of people here who don't post on this forum and are therefore underrepresented in this discussion.
It seems alien to Americans on other forums to defend the British custom and practice but you can't escape the almost magnetic pull of specific fixed holidays based on a religious heritage that they don't share. (My controversial opinion is that we should also observe Eid al-Fitr and Diwali, given the significant Hindu and Muslim populations in the workforce, but that was difficult when the local education authority in Waltham Forest in the 1980s tried to achieve it and it comes with all kinds of issues when substitution days are added for holidays that fall at a weekend.)
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