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No Vacation Nation
It’s Labor Day weekend, and another summer vacation season has come to an end. For the 71 percent of working Americans who actually get a paid vacation, that is. If this year was like last year or the one before that, half of all Americans will have taken only a week—or less—off work this summer. Compare that to an average of five weeks in Europe and you get an idea why some people call the United States “No Vacation Nation.”
In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller lamented that we “suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation,” but even those two weeks aren’t a legal right, and millions of working Americans don’t get them.
Nearly all other countries in the world have something we don’t: a national law mandating that workers receive some amount of paid vacation each year. Only the Guyanas, Nepal, and that paragon of human rights, Myanmar (Burma) join the US in having no vacation law.
What’s with the difference? And does it really matter if people have vacation time or not? Some 50 experts from the fields of medicine, psychology, business, labor, recreation, environmental sciences, and family studies joined a group of activists at Seattle University to try to answer those questions.
Their answers were resoundingly clear: vacations are not an idle luxury. They’re a crucial ingredient in creating a healthy, civically engaged, and environmentally responsible society.
Vacations matter, especially for health. Sarah Speck, a cardiologist at Seattle’s Swedish hospital, scared everyone at the conference with a graphic look at the impact of stress, and especially workplace stress, on heart health, concluding that such stress is “the new tobacco,” and that vacations are an important way to reduce stress and burnout. Dr. Arnold Pallay, a family physician from New Jersey, confirmed Dr. Speck’s findings, saying that many of the health problems his patients suffer from stem from lack of vacation time. “Take two weeks and call me in the morning,” he tells them.
Representative Alan Grayson of Orlando, Florida introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, the first effort to pass a vacation law in the United States since 1936. “When people tell me they oppose such a law, I ask them if they get vacations,” Grayson told participants, “and every single one of them has said, ‘Yes.’ They want vacations for themselves but not for others.”
Grayson’s proposed law (HR 2564) is extremely modest—one to two weeks of paid time off for workers in companies with more than 50 employees—but it’s a start, a down payment toward a time when we recognize the greater cost we pay for not providing vacation time. Even now, that cost to our already overburdened health system is substantial—men who don’t take regular vacations are 32 percent more likely to have heart attacks than those who do; for women, the figure is 50 percent. And they are two to three times as likely to suffer from depression.
With the fight over health care reform heating up, it’s useful to consider that in Europe, where long vacations and shorter working weeks are common, people live longer and healthier lives than in the U.S. while spending only half as much on health care. We need to insure everyone in the United States, but that alone won’t improve our health. Working less, and instead spending more time exercising, eating well, connecting with friends and family, sleeping, and relieving the stress caused by our long working hours, will.
Indeed, according to Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of Public Health, even the involuntary drop in working hours caused by the recent recession has had a positive impact on Americans’ health, as people are exercising more, eating better and eating out less (since they can’t afford as many restaurant meals), sleeping more, spending more time with friends and family, driving less, and breathing less pollution. We don’t want to lose these health improvements when our economy rebounds.
Vacations also offer considerable benefits for productivity and creativity in the workplace, explained Joe Robinson, a business consultant. Several experts from both the U.S. and Canada pointed out the value of vacations for family bonding.
Moreover, working less is essential to a sustainable environment. We Americans consume more than the planet will bear. It’s time to begin trading gains in productivity for time instead of for stuff. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that simply by cutting our work time to European levels, we could reduce our energy use and carbon footprint by 25-30 percent. It would also make us happier—Forbes magazine reported that the four happiest nations on earth—Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden—are all characterized by the comparatively short working hours and attentiveness to work-life balance.
Each year, October 24th marks Take Back Your Time Day, an event started by the Take Back Your Time organization. This year, October 24th is also the date of scheduled “350” actions against global warming. In support, Take Back Your Time Day’s theme this year is “Chill Out.” The idea is that slowing down and working less can chill us out—and chill a warming planet as well.
It’s time to take the issue of time seriously. Our lives and our planet depend on it.
36 Comments so far
Show AllEnough of this...now get back to work!
Representative Alan Grayson of Orlando, Florida introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, the first effort to pass a vacation law in the United States since 1936. “When people tell me they oppose such a law, I ask them if they get vacations,” Grayson told participants, “and every single one of them has said, ‘Yes.’ They want vacations for themselves but not for others.”
Here's the solution. The US is too large and populous for one federal government.
So we split the place in two.
One half will be for those who want vacations, etc., for themselves but not for others.
In the other half will live people who are fair-minded.
And we erect an impenetrable wall to separate the two sides.
Any guesses about the resulting population numbers?
The key words: "The US is too large and populous for one federal government.
So we split the place in two," actually we need to split into 5 or 6 different countries. All the conservatives could move to Texas and most of the South, and the liberals could all move to the northwest and northeast and leave everything in between to us independent thinking types.
Forget vacations. How about splitting it up into one country that wants endless imperial wars, and another country that wants to rejoin the civilized world.
I got mine - and fuck you!
That is the National Motto of the United States. Even Obama likes it.
Well put Mordechai. You boiled the American Experience down to just six words.
which secretary of state was it? Baker? in the reagan years that said to the world - the equivalent of "fuck you"?
"WE PRINT THE DOLLARS and it's YOUR problem".
Or another sentence I can well imagine coming from a conservative's lips.... "Every worker getting two weeks off is somehow going to cost ME."
"We don’t want to lose these health improvements when our economy rebounds."
We could all be chilling underground by that time...taking the eternal vacation
George Wanker Bush (who knows something about vacations) would tell you: "You can take as much vacation as you want when you die."
With the economy left in shambles--what working men and women can even afford vacation--even if it were paid--they need the money to pay down their rip-off credit card debt. And that is if they have jobs to vacation from.
Once again the US comes in DEAD LAST in the industrialized world when it comes to vacation and time off. For those lucky enough to have a job, that is.
Even workaholic countries like Japan get more time off. When I worked in Europe I got 6 weeks paid vacation, not including national holidays, and that was pretty much normal. 4 weeks is the usual minimum guaranteed paid vacation time in all 27 EU countries.
Meanwhile "worker productivity" is up in the US, due to workers having to do more and work harder just to keep their jobs. This results in larger profit margins even if the top line is down. Thus a "jobless recovery" will be gained from the hides of employed workers. How loveley for the corporate elite.
Who ever heard of vacations in a third world country? Maybe not yet but we are getting there fast.
de Graaf sez: "Grayson’s proposed law (HR 2564) is extremely modest—one to two weeks of paid time off for workers in companies with more than 50 employees ..."
***
U.S. corporations have already created enough loopholes to turn any act benefitting labor into a thin slice of Swiss cheese.
How many people have been 'downsized' from a company of more than 50 employees, only to have their duties outsourced to -- wait for it -- themselves! Only instead of an 'employee', they get to be a 'contractor'. Same great responsibilities, but without all the unnecessary baggage like health insurance and paid vacation.
Nobody? Guess it was just me.
I was too. I didn't take them up on it.
Under smaller government is better theory, there no need for mandated vacation times.
The people can refuse to work for firms that do not offer vacations. People who do not want vacations and would rather work then have the CHOICE of doing so.
They can "shop around" for their jobs like good consumers just as they can shop around for a Kidney transplant or cancer treatment waiting until the price right or there a two for one sale so as to save THEIR money.
Its about freedom and liberty and having time off from work does not make you free!!
Right?
Don't forget 'choices' either.
With unemployment skyrocketing, plenty of people will get extended vacations. They might have a chance to realize how badly they've been screwed all along!
When you understand that this is an oligarchy and workers have no nothing for anything except working until they drop dead and just hope they have broke even is as disgusting as it gets but, we continue to support the corporations that rule us and do absolutely nothing to protest, boycott or whatever it may take to put the people back in charge with an elected government, local state & federal, that pays attention and works for the people and the biggest key here would be to stop the goddamn lobbyists dead cold and make it a capital offense for any one to influence peddle government elected people or departments.
John
How are you?
Tried to reach out to you a few days ago as I am offering a panel titled 'No Vacation Nation, Is Vagabonding the Right Medicine' for 'South by Southwest Interactive in Austin.
Voting on Ideas is Currently under way and closes at 11 pm on Labor Day (SEPT 7).
Here is a link for Some details and the Voting Page
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/2893
We wrote a number of pieces on this topic as well on 'Serge the Concierge'
You will find them here
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com/no-vacation-nation/
A bientot
Serge
'The French Guy from New Jersey'
Would be happy to have you on the panel
Serge
Americans (most Americans that I have known) have strange ideas:
1. Children need fancy toys, not parents.
2. Young children do not need mothers.
3. The people who take care of children are worth but a fraction of a professional wage, apparently either because what they do is easy or does not matter.
4. Education is learning to do what someone else, an employer, wants you to do, yet --
5. The sole beneficiary of an education is not the employer who hires the work or the client who receives the service, but the student, who should therefore take responsibility to invest not only time but money, and not only invest money, but generally pay interest on borrowed money for such investment.
6. It is the responsibility of every individual who drives a car to get to do what someone else wants to pay a third party to insure that any possible victims of a driving error be compensated. This is true although most Americans usually drive without adequate sleep. It is also true despite widespread corporate sabotage of public transport.
7. Americans are "affluent" although they cannot pay for homes and raise children and although they cannot afford medical care.
8. One can reasonably measure American affluence by noting the many foreign-built trinkets for sale at relatively low prices.
9. One can reasonably measure affluence by GNP, regardless of what's produced, how it's distributed, or how the price (as measured in the GNP) is established.
10. More credit and higher prices means a greater GNP even if the same people use the same products the same way.
11. Americans are free, but cannot do what they want.
It goes on.
Americans need not only a vacation. They need a work week ceiling, and enforced 3-day sabbath or something.
you say americans are free - don't tell that to paul craig roberts, chief economist under reagan
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.
Have a look at economic policy. It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs.
It was the banks, not the millions of Americans who have lost homes, jobs, health insurance, and pensions, that received $700 billion in TARP funds. The banks used this gift of capital to make more profits. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs announced record second quarter profits and large six-figure bonuses for every employee.
The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy is another gift to the banks. It lowers their cost of funds and increases their profits. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, banks became high-risk investment houses that trade financial instruments such as interest rate derivatives and mortgage backed securities. With abundant funds supplied virtually free by the Federal Reserve, banks are paying depositors virtually nothing on their savings.
Despite the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy, beginning October 1 banks are raising the annual percentage rate (APR) on credit card purchases and cash advances and on balances that have a penalty rate because of late payment. Banks are also raising the late fee. In the midst of the worst economy since the 1930s, heavily indebted Americans, who are losing their jobs and their homes, are to be bled into bankruptcy by the very banks that are being subsidized with TARP funds and low interest rates.
Moreover, it is the American public that is on the hook for the TARP money and the low interest rates. As the US government’s budget is 50 per cent or more in the red, the TARP money has to be borrowed from abroad or monetized by the Fed. This means more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value and a rise in import prices and also domestic inflation.
Americans will thus pay for the TARP and low interest rate subsidies to their financial rulers with erosion in the purchasing power of the dollar. What we are experiencing is a massive redistribution of income from the American public to the financial sector.
Consider America’s wars. As of the moment of writing, the out-of-pocket cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $900,000,000,000. When you add in the already incurred future costs of veterans benefits, interest on the debt, the forgone use of the resources for productive purposes, and such other costs as computed by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes, “our” government has wasted $3,000,000,000,000--three thousand billion dollars--on two wars that have no benefit whatsoever for any American whose income does not derive from the military/security complex, about which five-star general President Eisenhower warned us.
The cost of America’s wars is a huge burden on a bankrupt country, but the cost incurred by veterans might be even higher. Homelessness is a prevalent condition of veterans, as is post-traumatic stress. American soldiers, who naively fought for the munitions industry’s wars, for high compensation for the munitions CEOs, and for dividends and capital gains for the munitions shareholders, paid not only with lives and lost limbs, but also with broken marriages, ruined careers, psychiatric disorders, and prison sentences for failing to make child support payments.
What did Americans gain from an unaffordable war in Iraq that lasted far longer than World War II and that put into power Shi’ites allied with Iran?
The answer is obvious: nothing whatsoever.
What did the armaments industry gain? Billions of dollars in profits.
Obama is the presidential candidate who promised to end the war in Iraq. He hasn’t. But he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, started a new war in Pakistan, intends to repeat the Yugoslav scenario in the Caucasus, and appears determined to start a war in South America. In response to the acceptance by US puppet president of Columbia, Alvaro Uribe, of seven US military bases in Columbia, Venezuela warned South American countries that the “winds or war are beginning to blow.”
Here we have the US government, totally dependent on the generosity of foreigners to finance its red ink, which extends in large quantities as far as the eye can see, completely under the thumb of the military/security complex, which will destroy us all in order to meet Wall Street share price expectations.
Will Americans, smashed and destroyed by “their” government’s policy, which always puts Americans last, ever understand who their real enemies are?
Will Americans realize that they are not ruled by elected representatives but by an oligarchy that owns the Washington whorehouse?
Will Americans ever understand that they are impotent serfs?
bardamu, You need to hang around with a better class of people. They are out there. The folks I hang around with see things a bit differently:
1. Parents are the most important part of a child's life, especially--
2. Their mother, during the earliest years.
3. The people who take care of children are priceless. We call them "Mom". Surrogates are sometimes financially necessary, but as a temporary measure. The best are "Grandma".
4. True Education is learning to be a productive, active, well-adjusted, citizen with a strong sense of civic responsibility. To this end, the necessary subjects are history, civics, mathematics, science, language, writing, and economics. Extensive reading and study of the classics is the background for all other subjects.
5. The first beneficiary of education is the educated person, who is now capable of making a living doing the things that fulfill them and make them happy. The second, equally important beneficiary is society, who gains a self-sufficient contributor and a civic leader. Most of my friends are against debt in general. Certainly, large student loans do not make much sense.
6. Each person who drives a car is responsible for any damage that might be done as a result of that person's actions or accidents. Liability insurance, complete with graduated-risk premiums is a time-honored, very fair way to guarantee that responsibility.
7. Many Americans make poor choices with their money. This is the result of the government-run school system completely ignoring personal finance skills and the lack of parental teaching of money management. Most of the families with whom we associate live within or below their means and nicely afford housing, medical care, children, and some modest luxuries. And yes, we do consider ourselves "affluent", even "rich" by world standards, even though our incomes are clustered around the median for the US.
8. We believe the best way to measure affluence is by how much we can give away to those who need it.
9. My friends and I don't really worry about the GNP, nor are we caught up in obsessively measuring affluence. See the point above.
10. See number 9.
11. Americans who are "free" but cannot do what they want, are indeed slaves to whatever master they have chosen. The key to individual and societal freedom is education, responsibility, and civic involvement. See 4, 5, & 7 above.
Want real freedom? The answer is not 3-day weekends, 3-week vacations, or long naps on Tuesday afternoons. It is getting an education that allows you to make a living doing something that you enjoy so much that you miss it when you do go on vacation. Want a free society? Do the same for everyone. Stop teaching PC crap in the schools, set some real standards, hire some real teachers for some real money, and hold them accountable for the success of their students. Lastly, shame on parents who do not do this for their children.
Most people I've met in the USA brag about how many hours they work per week, or how many multiple jobs they held through college, etc.
I don't think they put a priority on their life-work balance. They even seem to me to have a "holier than thou" attitude for working so hard.
Great comment, reminds me of 'whitewashing the fence' in Tom Sawyer. You know you've won when the workers want to work more for less pay, lower benefits and no vacations. Americans are getting dumber by the minute.
I think we all remember GW Bush saying in response to a women who mentioned she worked three jobs to make ends meet..
Something to the effect of You work three jobs..good for you. Thats the AMERICAN way.
Yes, I remember that woman, and her question.
The woman was a single-mom in Omaha, Nebraska who was working three jobs to make ends meet.
Can anyone really think this is a healthy way to live? Does the mom have any time left to spend with her children? Or, even to take a bath?
Quite honestly, being a single mother has never been any less burdensome with the Democrats in control of the government. George Bush was right, "That's the American way!"
Family values in this country are a myth!
Happy Labor Day!
We would need to repeal NAFTA, GATT, etc. and put high tariffs in place to get our manufacturing sector moving and let the people call the shots instead of the multinationals.
The term "creative insubordination," allows "at will," vacation time. Laugh, love, and live at their expense.
There is method in the madness of Americans' overwork.
The method proceeds from the internal logic of a subtler system: Hi-tek authoritarianism, call it.
A system that enables increasingly disproportionate greed legitimated benefis to the few at the expense of the many.
A mad system to be sure. A fortiori, since its distortions now also come at the expense of poisoning the food chain which supports all human life; life for the needy and the greedy alike.
The captains of America's capitalistic system are mad, for sure.
But sociopathic madness rarely disempowers any given sociopath's cleverness at hiding his/her agenda.
More often the opposite occurs, and especially so whenever sociopaths run together in a mutually empowering group.
Clearly, too much leisure time for too many Americans, in particular, would endanger the control levers that keep such a system functioning with de jure culture assent.
Dysfunctioning, more accurately.
Unstructured leisure, too uncontrolled much time-off, possibly leading to independent contemplation by the many, will never be allowed by the system now in place in America.
If Americans at-large being thinking too independently about what their lives could or should be, especially by knowledgeable comparison with what the lives of average western Europeans now, already, are, then domestic Business and its political puppets will co-opt and re-direct that popular energy with newly hypnotizing, sincerely-sounding ads, nostrums, promises, false comparisons, and finally, if all that fails, dire threats.
Just as it has to date, for decades.
It's understood that too much general thinking would result in focused popular demands for a more humane and sustainable way of living, leading to parallel demands to overhaul the political system.
The ideological chiefs of America, those who affirm an existential model of personal economic profit-at-any-price, and their purchased stooges in government, know the dangers of deeper popular thinking full well: they know that a manipulated population must be kept materially and instinctually distracted.
Superficially 'happy' when possible and terrorized when not.
Keep those holiday time, de rigeur football games coming; those holiday shopping super-frenzies coming (holidays, if too free of official programming, being especially dangerous times for a semi-soft tyranny alwys in danger of loosing its grip.)
Keep those cell phones coming, too (these mass dispersed micro-engines, serving no useful purpose so far, except to keep individuals from ever being alone with their natural instincts and thoughts.)
You don't have to be a Marxist to agree with circa 1960's Herbert Marcuse's observation regarding what programmed co-option of natural leisure does to the standard individual's consciousness.
It eventually guts it; renders it easy pickings for transformation to Pod Personhood.
Marcuse's term to describe this co-option of private leisure by fascist states was "Repressive Desublimation," -- a consciousness-raising use of words, if ever there was one.
But as Marcuse's, for one, analyses and terms have fallen into cultivated obscurity, there remains not even a thought-provoking logos by which to identify the phenomenon of artificial overwork or the unnatural reason behind it.
Plato said, in his well meaning but totalitarian model of the Virtuous State: If you would control the appetities of the People, first control the poets and the musicians.
The American system, of course, is more subtle than that. Its' not like Plato's imagined Republic or one of the totalitarian model's more recent versions, the Soviet Union.
America leaves poets, humanist philospphers, musicians and the like, largely alone. Free to dissent.
There is no need to illegalize this kind this energy in a one dimensional society , hi-teck tyranny; tolerance of such higher minded dissent being in fact useful to maintaining the systme's falsely benign, democratic imagery.
As long as outside, deeper visions don't get the people too doubtful about how they're living, or the viability of what they believe-in, the alternate visions can be absorbed and even officially sponsored by the system.
As Marcuse also observed, it's not likely that a too-far-gone system, like America's, can rescue itself peacefully from within; though, the one thing that might begin to allow that rescue, is genuine, deep, unplugged, instinctual leisure.
Well observed!
BTW, I've coined the term "technobarbarism" for our post-civilized high-tech culture-- pseudo-culture, that is.
It saddens me that apart from an economy that mandates wage-slavery, there remains a social norm in which most people stoically accept the premise that modern man was born to sacrifice half of his adult life at the beck and call-- not to mention mercies-- of an employer.
I know so many people who conclude that this is pretty much the deal, so why ask why?
· Yr Obd't Servant
consider this Insanity:
there are actually American workplaces that severely understaff and overwork and underpay -- that they actually , if they "offer" paid sick days -
ACTUALLY will instruct their employees to ARRANGE their sick days - so as to not disturb the work-flow -
actually tell employees to SAY IN ADVANCE -- WHEN they are TAKING their Sick Days......in other words...WHEN they are "going to be sick"......and to ARRANGE it around the workplace's prefered schedules...
can you believe that?.
Thinking systematically takes a lot more time and a lot more study than probably most people realize. Real concentration on nearly any serious subject is very hard to come by.
It's not merely the little things in life that get in the way, it is also all the great diversions intentionally imposed upon us to make us think that the government has our best interests in mind while they create one personal crisis after another. We have most of us become potholes in their road.
It strikes me that except at virtually only the municipal and small farm level, there is an inverse relationship between the actual UTILITY of the work being performed and the BENEFITS paid in this country. We reward the rich for wrecking the Economy, while we vilify the poor, who actually work harder.
What is happening now is a Division between "work" in the Classical sense (including Marx, and physics) and "profit."
Our Economy is now a Geithner Goldman-Sachs and NY Fed Economy that is actually defying the other branches of The Fed, something you are not finding reported in the Coastal MSM. Most do not understand that the Fed has Districts, and they do not always agree.
Turn off the goddam TV, stop taking yore meds, and listen to the sounds and rhythms around you. Yeah, this may at first sound Romantic, but if yore job is useless to Humanity, quit it, right now. Become yore own boss.
We on the Left have far more in common with the REAL Tea-Party People than we will readily admit. Time to join forces.
Paid vacation? You gotta be kiddin. My 1985 Crown Vic hasn't had a paid vacation in decades...
Paid time off on Labor Day? Give me a break.
Join the Main Street Party and seek a 30-hour week. That would go far to reduce "unemployment." Call in sick. Swine flu should do it. "I think I have swine flu." Temporarily, lose the capacity for speech. Get gutteral.
-30-
Grayson told participants, “and every single one of them has said, ‘Yes.’ They want vacations for themselves but not for others.”
“and every single one of them has said, ‘Yes.’ They want vacations for themselves but not for others.”
“and every single one of them has said, ‘Yes.’ They want PRIVILEGE for themselves but not for others.”
AND THAT WILL BE HUMANITY'S EPITAPH.