Interesting; in academia it's usually thought of as leave from normal day-to-day responsibilities (teaching, supervision, running a lab) in order to enable you to undertake a significant project requiring some time to think, such as writing a book. But in academia the term "sabbatical" usually refers to paid leave, while it sounds like in industry it often refers to unpaid leave. If that's the case, it would make sense that unpaid leave comes with fewer assumptions about what you're supposed to do in the meantime.
Yes I think so. It's a long period you take to do stuff that's important to you, and know you have a job to come back to, but they don't pay you. That's the idea I have anyway.
The company I worked for let you do it for a period of 2 months-2 years, after you'd worked for them a minimum of two years, and at most every ... 5(?) years, something like that. All at management discretion, of course. I think if you wanted to disappear for two years every 5 then you'd have to be very good at your job to keep it. For me it was 6 months after ~5 years.
Interestingly, in Australia, there is statutory long service leave that accrues over 10 years in addition to ordinary leave, so if you work somewhere for 10 years you get about 8 weeks paid time off, which people usually take in one lump to go travelling.
That'd only be worth doing if the cost of hiring a replacement and getting them up to speed is less than just paying 2 months' salary. Sometimes true, sometimes not true.
Beyond that it varies by state. In New South Wales, from what I can gather, the employee can cash out a pro-rata portion of the benefit upon termination if they've been employed for longer than 5 years, unless fired for misconduct. So you'd have to lay everyone off after 4 years 11 months to keep from paying out, which would increase the cost of employee churn even more.
Strange as it may seem, some emplyers value their employees and replacing someone after ten years is going to be a hell of a lot more expensive (in terms of lost value an retraining) than 8 weeks paid leave.
Besides which, you'd probably get screwed in an employment tribunal (IIRC Australia doesn't have 'at-will' style employment like the US)
