Ahh, Free at La -- Oops! Time's Up

[moochpuppy]

By Joe Robinson

Sunday, July 27, 2003;

SANTA MONICA, Calif.

 

 

"How do Americans do it?" asked the stunned Australian I met on a remote

Fijian shore. He

had zinc oxide and a twisted-up look of absolute bafflement on his face.

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 vacation

allotment 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 annual five weeks off -- 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 shrinking faster

than revenues on a

corporate restatement. Though it's the height of summer, I'm betting

you're not reading

this while lolling on the beach. A 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 American vacation trip buzzsawed 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-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 so many of us weren't doing the

jobs of three

people. The result is unrelieved stress, burnout, absenteeism, rising

medical costs,

diminished productivity and the loss of time for life and family.

 

 

In the course of doing my own survey for a book on how we can be

productive and have a

life at the same time, I've heard all about the vanishing vacation from

Americans who say

they 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 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?"

 

 

As someone raised on summer vacation road trips in my family's intrepid

station wagon, I

believe that's a question we've lost sight of. After writing about our

vacation deficit

disorder as a journalist, I decided three years ago to start a

grass-roots campaign to

lobby for a law mandating a minimum of three weeks of paid leave. Since

then, thousands of

Americans have signed a supporting petition, and many have volunteered

poignant tales from

the overworked-place, such as the 35-year-old victim of a heart attack

whose doctor

attributed 100 percent of his ailment to unrelieved job stress, or the

50-year-old

engineer who was downsized to a job that offered zero paid leave.

 

 

In the early '90s, 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.

 

 

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, most

of all, 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. In a new

poll of 700 companies by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee

assistance provider, 56

percent of workers would be postponing vacations until business improved.

 

 

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 United States 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 legally

mandated 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 us so guilty when we try to take one.

 

 

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 employee 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 employees 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.

 

 

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. But it

takes two weeks for this process to occur, says one study, 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 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.

 

 

This is why we need a 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 also

would end the loss

of accrued vacation time for 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.

 

 

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

itself is the truly

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 while I was on,

yes, vacation in the medieval city of Evora, Portugal. There, I visited a

bizarre little

church whose walls, columns and ceiling are plastered with the femurs,

tibias and skulls

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

designed by a creative

sort to aid in the contemplation of mortality. I must admit it provided a

very good

reality check, 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.