Custom calendar for calculating workdays per month
I'd start with a table that contains the date and some convenience columns plus a workday indicator.  (date full db date column, day, month, year, day_of_week, work_day Y/N field, isvacation, isweekday).

Populate that with values in the time range you're going to use.  Set appropriate flags (e.g. update date_table set isweekday where day_of_week between 1 and 5) and update all the work_day and isvacation flags by vacation that your company observes.  This is going to be a manual process, but not daunting.  Some holidays are the same day each year, some are not.  A vacation day could fall on the weekend, but be observed the previous Friday, etc.

Then you can calculate work hours pretty easily (e.g. select count(1)*8 from date_table where month = 1 and year = 2014 and work_day = 'Y'

Once the table is created, you can use it for lots of stuff.  Add a quarter field, first work day of the month field, day names, month names, etc..  Pretty handy, especially for reporting, just join on the truncated date column in your source data to the date field in the table.