Interesting article today on vacations. I get three weeks from my employer, plus I "bought" a fourth (with pre-tax dollars). But many of my co-workers feel too busy or too driven to take their vacations, and when the new year rolls around, they've already got so much time in the "bank" that they lose vacation time. This is insane.
Land of the free. Home of the brave. Yeah, right.
a few snips...
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/2023739A survey by the Internet travel company Expedia.com has found that Americans will be taking 10 percent less vacation time this year than last -- too much work to get away, said respondents. This continues a trend that has seen the average vacation Americans take buzz-sawed down to a long weekend, according to the travel industry. Some 13 percent of American companies now provide no paid leave, up from 5 percent five years ago, according to the Alexandria, Va.-based Society for Human Resource Management. In Washington state, a whopping 17 percent of workers get no paid leave.
In the early 1990s, Juliet Schor called attention to skyrocketing work weeks and declining free time in her book The Overworked American. In the decade since that groundbreaking work appeared, things not only haven't gotten any better -- they've gotten worse. We're now logging more hours on the job than we have since the 1920s. Almost 40 percent of us work more than 50 hours a week. And just a couple of weeks ago, before members of the House of Representatives took off on their month-plus vacations, they opted to pile more work onto American employees by approving the White House's rewrite of wage and hour regulations, which would turn anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a salaried employee who can be required to work unlimited overtime for no extra pay.
The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation. But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the United States and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways.
Evidence shows that time off is not the enemy of productivity; to the contrary, it's the engine. U.S. companies that have implemented a three-week vacation policy have seen their profits and productivity soar. Profits have doubled at the H Group, a financial services firm in Salem, Ore., since an across-the-board three-week vacation became the rule nine years ago. They have risen 15 percent at Jancoa, a Cincinnati-based janitorial services firm with 468 employees that also went to a three-week policy a few years ago. The owners of both these companies told me they believe the switch in vacation policy is directly responsible for the improvement.
And contrary to the American myth, a number of European countries have caught up with the United States in productivity. In fact, Europe had a higher productivity growth rate in 14 of the 19 years between 1981 and 2000, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board.
I find it strange that the land of the free should be so deficient in vacation time, which is as free as you can get all year. In fact, the word vacation comes from the Latin root vacatio, which means "freedom." A vacation is our chance to get out there and discover and travel, to connect with family and friends, to put one over on the survival game. But fear is a specialist in strangling liberty. We're told that, with real vacations, companies would fall apart and the U.S. economy would suddenly turn into Paraguay's.