The Nation: More Time Off!

[marmar]

BLOG | Posted 04/14/2008 @ 10:16am
More Time Off!
J. Goodrich



That is something that middle class Americans really, really want, based on a recent Pew Research Center national public opinion survey.

Oh, to be able to read a book! To lie down on the beach and hear just the waves breaking instead of all that rush-hour traffic! To have time to just sit there, instead of always doing something!

Or that's how I imagine the internal conversations of the poll respondents. Ezra Klein points out that leisure time was rated more desirable in the poll than careers, marriages and having children:

Now, it's probably not that adults really value leisure time above their families and their god. So the impressive showing of leisure time suggests that that's where Americans feel particularly squeezed and out of control -- that's their top priority because it's the one they don't know how to achieve. And that's a shame. We're a rich society. We could afford to guarantee our workers paid vacation, we could afford to offer paid sick days, we could afford to make it easier to live a life in accordance with our preferences, rather than constantly fearing that actually taking necessary or desired time off will tarnish your reputation around the workplace.

That's it, in a nutshell. The US is the only advanced economy that doesn't require firms to give their workers any paid vacation time. So it's up to the workers to request it, and any such request will have to comply with the implicit corporate norms or you will start looking like a loafer, like someone not willing to work hard.

Perhaps this is why the average full-time worker in Germany has almost eight weeks of holiday and paid vacation time in a year, while the average full-time worker in the US gets by with a little less than an annual total of four weeks? Even the Irish get to spend almost six weeks off the job every year, and theirs is the next most dismal figure in this international comparison of vacation times. All those other countries have statutory minimum vacation time which the workers must be given, though the actual time off exceeds that. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/passingthrough?bid=769

[flowomo]

1. I wrote my weekly newspaper column about this last July...

http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2007/07/06/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis64.txt


A little more time off, please
By Rich Lewis, July 6, 2007
Last updated: Friday, July 6, 2007 10:18 AM EDT

Wasn't it great having a day off with pay this week to celebrate the 4th of July?

What's that you say? You didn't get a paid holiday?

That's OK - you've still got that two or three weeks of paid vacation coming to you this summer.

What? You don't get a paid vacation, and certainly not more than a few days?

Well, that's just the way it is. After all, no country can afford to have all its workers getting bunches of paid holidays and vacation days. Life is hard.
If that happens to be how you see it, then you might be interested in a new report from the European Trade Union Institute. Just as Michael Moore's “Sicko” suggests that our health-care system is a disaster compared to systems in other countries, this report shows that the way we approach time-off is also amazingly out of step with the rest of the civilized world.

The title of the report says it all: “No-vacation nation USA.” You can see it for yourself (www.etui-rehs.org/en).

The report, written by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., takes a close look at 21 of the 30 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They include 16 European countries, plus Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

The bottom line: “The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid leave.”

The only one.

And as a result, “U.S. workers are less likely to receive paid annual leave or paid public holidays, and those that do generally receive far less than their counterparts in comparable world economies.”

In the other 20 countries, the governments require by law that employers give workers paid holidays and vacations. And we're talking about serious vacation time: “Members of the European Union and other European countries analyzed here all establish a legal right to at least 20 days of paid leave (vacation) per year, with legal requirement of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Australia and New Zealand both require employers to grant at least 20 paid-leave days per year.”

The laggards are Canada and Japan, which mandate “only” 10 paid days off.

On top of paid vacations, “most of the rest of the world's rich countries offer between five and 13 paid public holidays per year.” The United States “offers none.”

I don't blame you if you're feeling a little jealous at this point.

Of course, workers in the United States get paid vacations and holidays. The difference is that here the number of days off (and when) is completely up to the private employer. Some employers are generous; others are not - but if you really need the job (as Moore suggests you might, just for the health insurance), then you take what's offered and shut your mouth.

Some employers add insult to injury by insisting that an employee unhappy at having little or no time off is “lucky to have a job” or should remember that people in other countries “have it much worse.” Actually, they don't.

Ray and Schmitt take a detailed look at the situation in the United States and this is what they find:

� 77 percent of all American workers get some paid vacation/holidays, including 90 percent of full-time workers, but only 36 percent of part-time workers.

� For those who do get paid days off, the average is 12 vacation days and eight holidays (compared to 20 or more vacation days and up to 13 holidays in the other countries).

� For all workers, including those who don't get paid days off, the average in the U.S. is nine vacation days and six holidays.

The hardest hit are those making less than $15 an hour. Only 69 percent of them get vacation days, whereas 88 percent of those making over $15 an hour get paid time off. That's a depressing double - bad pay and no time off.

Workers in companies with 99 employees or fewer do much worse than those in companies with 100 employees or more - only 70 percent of the first group gets paid days off, compared to 86 percent of the second group.

No wonder then that Ray and Schmitt conclude: “The United States is in a class of its own with respect to statutory guarantees of paid time off: It is the no-vacation nation.”

And here's the kicker: An April survey by the New York-based Hudson Highland Group, showed that more than half of U.S. workers fail to take all of their vacation days.

Americans not only get far less time off then people in other “advanced economies,” they are often afraid to take what's offered.

Why?

“A lot of people feel they can't take time off,” Peg Buchenroth, senior vice president of human resources at Hudson, told Reuters. “Either they have too much work to do or they're just concerned about their job security so they don't want to be absent. Or the work environment and the company they work for isn't really supportive of people taking extended vacations.”

That's the American way.

Or, as the headline on the Reuters story about the ETUI study put it: “Europe heads to beach, America heads to work.”

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Rich Lewis' e-mail address is:

[tularetom]

2. Before I retired I had a job where I got seven weeks of leave a year

I did not know WTF to do with all that time off. I couldn't afford to play golf, go fishing, or whatever every friggin day. I did a lot of work around the house - eventually everything either got fixed or we ran out of money to fix it with.

My wife couldn't get that much time off so we couldn't go anywhere together.

It got to the point where I just worked four day weeks in the months between May and October and took every Friday off.

Well, it was good practice for retirement.