Vacation Starvation

[Guest guest]

This isn't an accident. This came about by political engineering. The same for

the need of 2+ earners per household to be able to provide for a family, the

declining real avaerage wage, etc. Those politicians look out for their real

constituants.

 

These figures are probably based on all employees which includes government

workers, if it were only based on nongovenment employees it would probably look

far worse.

 

Just a small price to live in the best democracy money can buy.

Frank

 

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16611

 

Vacation Starvation

 

Joe Robinson, AlterNet

August 15, 2003Viewed on August 18, 2003

 

" How do Americans do it? " asked the stunned Australian. He had zinc oxide and a

twisted-up look of absolute bafflement on his face, as we spoke on a remote

Fijian shore. I'd seen that expression before, on German, Swiss and British

travelers. It was the kind of amazement that might greet someone who had

survived six months at sea in a rowboat.

 

The feat he was referring to is how Americans manage to live with the stingiest

vacations in the industrialized world -- 8.1 days after a year on the job, 10.2

days after three years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Aussie,

who took every minute of his five weeks off each year -- four of them guaranteed

by law -- just couldn't fathom a ration of only one or two weeks of freedom a

year. " I'd have to check myself into the loony bin, " he declared.

 

Well, welcome to the cuckoo's nest, mate, otherwise known as the United States.

In this country, vacations are not only microscopic; they're also shrinking

faster than revenues on a corporate restatement. A survey by Internet travel

company Expedia.com has found that Americans will be taking 10 percent less

vacation time this year -- too much work to get away, said respondents. This

continues a trend that has seen the standard U.S. vacation, as measured by the

travel industry, buzzsawed down to a long weekend.

 

Some 13 percent of companies now provide no paid leave, up from 5 percent five

years ago, according to the Alexandria-based Society for Human Resource

Management. In Washington state, a whopping 17 percent of workers get no paid

leave. Vacations are going the way of real bakeries and drive-in theaters, fast

becoming a quaint remnant of those pre-downsized days when we didn't have to

keep the CEO in art collections and mansions. The result is unrelieved stress,

burnout, absenteeism, rising medical costs, diminished productivity, and the

extinguishing of time for life and family.

 

Caught in a vise-grip of spiraling work hours and shrinking vacations, employees

across the country hardly have a chance to catch their breath or enjoy the

fruits of their labor. These are people like Nancy Jones, a nurse in Southern

California, who last year put in a vacation request in January to attend her

son's wedding in July. " They kept giving me the runaround, " she recalled. " They

tell you they don't know if you can have the time, because they expect to be

busy. It happens all the time. " After her manager ignored numerous requests, she

wound up having to corner the director of the company, just days before the

wedding, to get the time off.

 

An aerospace worker from Seattle sent me an e-mail that sums up the growing

dilemma of vacations that are only on paper: " If you try to take a couple of

your vacation days, you get told no, so your only recourse is to call in sick,

and probably not get paid for it, and risk getting management mad and becoming a

potential candidate for termination. What happened to families and the reason we

go to work to begin with? "

 

In the early '90s, Juliet Schor first 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 grown 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 last month, before members of the House of Representatives took off on

their month-plus vacations, they decided to pile more overtime on working

Americans by approving the White House's scrapping of 60 years of labor law with

a wholesale rewrite of wage and hour regulations, turning anyone who holds a

" position of responsibility " into a salaried employee who can be required to

work unlimited overtime for no extra pay.

 

Vacations are being downsized by the same forces that brought us soaring work

weeks: labor cutbacks, a sense of false urgency created by tech tools, fear and

guilt. Managers use the climate of job insecurity to stall, cancel and

abbreviate paid leave, while piling on guilt. The message, overt or implied, is

that it would be a burden on the company to take all your vacation days -- or

any. Employees get the hint: One out of five employees say they feel guilty

taking their vacation, reports Expedia's survey. A new poll of 700 companies by

ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance provider, found that 56

percent of workers would be postponing vacations until business improved.

 

The whole neurotic vacation system is based on guilt, on the notion that you are

never worthy enough to take time off. The guilt works, because we are programmed

to believe that only productivity and tasks have value in life, that free time

is worthless, though it produces such trifles as family, friends, passions --

and actual living.

 

But before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a

consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important

goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month

vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican

platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the

1920s. 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 U.S. and Europe,

which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways. Europe chose the

route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory

protection and voluntary paid leave. Now, we are the only industrialized nation

with no minimum paid-leave law. Europeans get four or five weeks by law and can

get another couple of weeks by agreement with employers. The Japanese have two

legal weeks, and even the Chinese get three. Our vacations are solely at the

discretion of employers. The lack of legal standing is what makes vacations here

feel so illegitimate -- and you so guilty when you try to take one.

 

The 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. Before the change, said the owner of

Jancoa, the company had a high turnover rate and chronic overtime; after the new

vacation policy went into effect, morale went sky-high, and so did productivity,

which solved both the turnover and overtime problems.

 

This is not surprising -- rested workers perform better than zombies, as fatigue

studies have demonstrated since the 1920s. One study showed that if you work

seven 50-hour weeks in a row, you'll get no more done than if you worked seven

40-hour weeks in a row. Yet we have made work style -- how long, how torturously

-- more important than how well we do the job, part of a destructive bravado

contest to see who can have less of a life than the next person. My ulcer's

bigger than yours.

 

I've heard so many poignant tales from the overworked-place, including that of a

35-year-old victim of a heart attack whose doctor attributed 100 percent of his

ailment to unrelieved job stress, or that of a 50-year-old engineer who was

downsized to a job that offered zero paid leave.

 

Overwork doesn't just cost employees. The tab paid by business for job stress is

$150 billion a year, according to one study. Yet vacations can cure even the

worst form of stress -- burnout -- by re-gathering crashed emotional resources,

say researchers. It takes two weeks for this process to occur, however, which is

why long weekends aren't vacations. An annual vacation can also cut the risk of

heart attack by 30 percent in men and 50 percent in women.

 

Walter Perkins, a finance VP for a large American engineering firm, told me how

he became a believer after running a Dutch firm acquired by his employer. He

presided over six-week holidays for his staff and says he saw no loss of

productivity.

 

" The Dutch work just as hard as their American counterparts, " Perkins said, " but

they have that knowledge that they're going to get that one month or more where

they can really recharge the batteries. Guess what? Things don't come to a

halt. " The stats back him up. Contrary to myth, a number of European countries

have caught 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. The Australians, with their five-week

vacations have also outperformed the U.S. in recent years.

 

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, travel, savor and 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

that the U.S. economy would suddenly turn into Paraguay's.

 

This is why we need a minimum paid leave law that will put an end to the bait

and switch of vacation time, as well as leave that's being yanked completely.

Legalized paid leave would also end the loss of accrued vacation time from

downsized workers in their thirties, forties and fifties, who have to start

their paid leave banks over again, as if they were at their very first job. We

can do better than having to prove we're worthy of vacation time until the day

we retire.

 

I agree that time is money, just not in the way we think it is. Time itself is

the real precious currency, because our supply of it is very limited. We need to

pump our fists when we get vacation time, and not feel guilty.

 

This was brought home to me in a bizarre little church in the medieval city of

Evora, Portugal, whose walls, columns and ceiling are plastered with the femurs,

tibias and skulls of hundreds of 16th-century monks. The Chapel of Bones was

designed by a creative sort to aid in the contemplation of mortality. I must

admit it gave me a very good idea of where things are headed, particularly the

parting words inscribed over the doorway: " We the bones already in here are just

waiting for the arrival of yours. "

 

Words to remember the next time someone wants to downsize your downtime into a

long weekend.

 

Joe Robinson is author of " Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life " and

founder of the Work to Live Campaign (www.worktolive.info), which is lobbying

for a three-week minimum paid-leave law.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.