The American Vacation Squeeze

As we enter the holiday season, it is a good time to reflect on how good we have it, in this land of plenty, and of the free, and home of the brave...

OK, that's enough reflection. Now get back to work.

We may be the land of the free, but one thing we have little free time to do, as employed workers, is take a vacation, and the main reason is that our lack of a minimum paid-leave law leaves businesses free to decide for themselves how much vacation time to grant to their employees.

Unsurprisingly, businesses find this to be a good deal. For them, if not for their employees. With no requirement to grant vacation time, business can be stingy with it.

Joe Robinson has written a great article on the issue at AlterNet called Vacation Starvation. In fact when I set out to write this entry, I almost felt compelled to simply reprint his entire article as it touches on so many of the points I wanted to address. Mr. Robinson is also the author of the guide "Work To Live", and an activist for a minimum paid-leave law through his Work to Live Web site.

He has a chart that shows just how much U.S. workers lag in time off as compared to workers in the other leading industrialized nations of the world. The U.S. is the only one of these nations to not have a minimum paid-leave law. Japan and Canada require a minimum of 10 days. China, 15 days. All the other nations at least 20 days. When you look at the actual yearly averages of paid-leave taken per nation, again the U.S. is the lowest at barely over 10 days, with most other nations at 25 days or above.

Proponents of no minimum paid-leave law argue that businesses can be more competitive without one. Unfettered by an artificial minimum days of required vacation, U.S. workers put in more days per year, and therefore productivity benefits. That's the theory. Yet, some of these other countries are apparently more productive per hour than the U.S. We may be working more hours, but we're not using them the most productively. In addition, there are the untold billions lost due to the side effects. Job stress alone supposedly costs businesses $150 billion per year. Commenting on an October 1999 report by the International Labor Organization, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said: "The number of hours worked is one important indicator of a country's overall productivity and quality of life." but indicated that "while the benefits of hard work are clear, it is not at all clear that working more is the same thing as working better." He added that many other factors "including productivity, compensation, unemployment, levels of technology, social benefits, job security and even cultural attitudes toward work and leisure need to be considered in any meaningful analysis of working time."

U.S. workers are therefore stuck having to fend for themselves. Few have the bargaining power to ask for and receive more vacation than their employer originally offers them. Unions are far and few between, and even then, when was the last time you heard about a union even clamoring for a minimum paid-leave bill? Indeed, most businesses have so much freedom to impose whatever vacation restrictions they want that a common, twisted, response to a vacation upgrade request is that they are not allowed to grant one because it is a company-wide policy. No exceptions allowed.

Come again?

In order to earn the vacation levels of a European, one has to work at a company for 20 to 30 years. Such longevity is becoming rare. Instead, the typical career will see a worker starting their vacation clock from scratch each time they change jobs. I'm a good example. After 16 years of working I have earned the right to 12 vacation days this year. That's barely more than I had just out of college. I worked 8 years in my first job and by the end of that period I was granted 17 days, plus two floating holidays for my service. I could also take 5 sick days. By American standards that was pretty good. However, it has been all downhill since then.

Not that I haven't tried to ask for more vacation. I've made vacation time a discussion item at every new job I've worked, but in only one instance did I receive additional days as requested, receiving 15 days instead of the regular 10 days. However, I believe I'm in a minority when it comes to taking such a stand, as the issue is not something most people feel comfortable raising when joining a new company.

Furthermore, many companies don't even call it vacation time anymore. It is paid time off, or PTO, and it doesn't just cover vacation time, but any time, including sick time. So, in my case, I've gone from 24 PTO days to 12 PTO days. If I get sick for too long there goes my plans for my vacation. So better to come in to work, even if I'm sick. I may infect others at work, but I'll be saving my precious vacation time.

Few companies even allow you to take unpaid leave time to add to your days off. Every day you aren't working is a day they view they're losing out on profit margins.

The problem is cultural too of course. A lot of American's hurt by the lack of a minimum paid-leave law would actually argue they prefer it that way. I think it has to do with our entrepreneurial spirit, and our tendency to believe that the business manager running company XYZ could easily be us, and we'd not want to be beholden to enforcing such a policy were the roles reversed. Unfortunately, we tend to take things even further and work huge amounts of overtime hours as well. The social implications of this, how it affects families, etc., are more than this one blog entry can cover, and a topic perhaps for another day.

NPR radio program, The Connection, from Boston station WBUR, covered the topic a couple of years ago, speaking with Joe Robinson among others, and is a good place to start if you want to dive into this topic further. The show runs 47 minutes. I also recommend supporting the effort at Work to Live to promote the need for a minimum paid-leave law in Congress.

Without a minimum paid-leave law, if anything is going to change it will require that each individual makes it a point to ask for more vacation time. If we all sit back like sheep on the matter, nothing will change. The lack of a law in some ways does also give you the power to turn down employment offers as a bargaining chip of your own. If a business cannot compete for your services because of their vacation policy, that might help them change it. Of course few have such a luxury, and few would care about the policy of a company they've chosen not to work at in the first place. Nevertheless, it is time workers took a stand.

Unfortunately, our Republican led, business fawning Congress, is unlikely to support such a law, yet while that may be true, it is all the more reason to support the effort and vote for candidates that might be more open to laws that protect workers from companies that over work them, while also maintaining the nation's lead in the world's economy. The challenge will be a stiff one with the rise of new economic powers in Asia - as we'll surely be told. One can only hope workers won't be squeezed even harder to meet that challenge.