Workaholic Americans disdain time off

[question everything]

Workaholic Americans disdain time off

By McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Sunday, February 17, 2008

438 million.

That's the estimated number of vacation days Americans failed to take in 2007. Psychologists, demographers and others say we pass over time off for many reasons -- everything from an entrenched Puritan work ethic, to fear of being seen as reckless slackers relaxing while the economy burns, to simply squirreling away time for days when we're stuck at home awaiting repair calls.

The figure for time left behind comes from Harris Interactive, the polling and research group, which for seven years has examined trends in unused vacation days for Expedia.com, the Internet travel booker... Others keep an eye on unused vacation. It's an issue for human resources managers, responsible for overseeing employee time off -- especially in companies where workers can roll days over to a new year or bank them for a windfall on leaving the firm. Researchers on work-life issues, psychologists and labor lawyers deal in the subject. And, of course, employers grapple with it, even as they fail to take their own time off.

(snip)

The 438 million days are worth about $60 billion, Harris Interactive says, using average hourly wages for the tabulation. As with many extrapolations, you can argue with the figure -- the Harris/Expedia poll says that 35 percent of all American workers, or about 51 million people, are the people who scrap vacation days, on average three per person. By that accounting, the total number of unused days would be about 153 million. The study then multiplies the entire American work force by three unused days, arriving at 438 million and change, and some time-management experts say they believe that's closer to reality. Even at the lower 153 million figure, we bypass enough time to fill more than 5,500 lifetimes of 75 years each.

(snip)

Not only do we regularly give up days we've often bargained hard to get, we get few compared with the rest of the industrialized world. In fact, the United States is singular when it comes to vacation days: We are the only advanced economy in the world without a minute of government-mandated time off. In order to be a member of the European Union, a nation's employers must offer workers a minimum of 20 days off a year. Several mandate more. According to "No-Vacation Nation," a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research about the United States' unique place in the balance between work and lifestyle, France requires the most vacation: 30 days, plus a paid holiday. Overall, though, the French are beaten by Austria and Portugal, which require employers to give 22 vacation days off, plus 13 holidays, for a total of 35 days off -- amounting to seven weeks a year.

(snip)

No time for vacation -- it's a running American theme despite much research that trumpets the restorative benefits of time off. These include the well-respected Framingham Heart Study, which found over two decades that workers who take annual vacations are less likely to die of heart attacks.

(snip)

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_552806.html

[Hydra]

1. No vacation days for me

so nothing to squander, yet. You can bet I'll take every single one once I do, though!

[supernova]

2. We do get vacation... we call it "LAID OFF"

Every two or three years, you can reliably be assured that the spectre of being laid off -- regardless of reason -- will rear it's ugly head.

So, we do get time off, it's just that we don't get it while we are working.

[guitar man]

3. Oh yeah

well, I'm up to 24 vacation days a year, one day short of 5 weeks and I'm taking every one of them....and my 11 paid holidays a year too!!

If I can get paid for not showing up to work, you can bet your sweet ass I'm not going to be there! :bounce:

[tridim]

4. You're very lucky

I haven't been able to take a vacation day for about 5 years now, nor have I EVER had a legal 40 hour work week. I'm an IT slave.

[guitar man]

8. well, the company I've worked for

for the last 7 years has a "use it or lose it" policy on vacation days, so the only way to collect what I have earned is to use it. I've told them in the past that any time they don't want me to take vacation days, they can let me cash them in. I had to correct one of our HR people when she said they "give" me vacation days. I said "no, I earned them, this company doesn't *give* me anything". That pretty much set the tone with them from that day on.

It must suck not being able to get away from work, I hope you can manage to get some time off before you burn out.

[LeftHander]

12. Digging your own grave....

In IT if you DON'T take off how can you possibly work long hours during "crunch times"?

Purposely working late rather than get rest and pick it up in the morning leads to poor decision making and mistakes.

If your bosses are okay with you working all the time then you need to reset their expectations, about what is a reasonable time frame and what isn't. Unless you are promising unrealistic time frames and then struggling through the inevitable bugs, errors and problems then you aren't managing your own skills. REMEMBER YOU ARE THE ONE WITH THE EXPERTISE! Not the manager who wants it done yesterday and has no clue how any of the technology really works.

For pete sake show some backbone. If you can't do it there...then it is time to move on.

[tridim]

16. It's a long story and beyond the scope of this thread

Promises made, promises broken.. "Let's just get over the hump and everything will be great". That kind of shit. Honestly the only reason I'm still here is because I have a sick dog and this job is close enough to home to allow me to check on her at lunch time.

That said, I'm constantly looking for other work but the last three IT jobs I've had have been extremely crappy. I think it's more of an industry-wide problem than I used to believe.

I've been thinking about falling back to my original degree and washing my hands clean of this IT BS, I'm way past the burn-out stage.

[raccoon]

20. You're very lucky. I haven't had paid time off since the early 90's. nt

[Warpy]

5. People use their vacation time to go to the DOCTOR

fer chrissakes. They use it to get the car fixed. They don't dare take it at all because they're so dependent on overtime that they can't afford a measly two weeks at straight pay. They're terrified that if they take a vacation, they'll come back to find out somebody else has been promoted in their place or that their job has been offshored while they've gone into debt to pay for a cheap hotel room three miles from a beach.

I didn't take a vacation for a solid 13 years at my last job. I didn't dare. I didn't have any benefits, including health insurance and vacation pay.

Companies are ending up with exhausted and burned out employees. Then the employees turn 45 and are fired because they cost more than younger workers.

This country is cruel to its people. It has to stop.

[question everything]

15. Ours is the only industrialized nation that does not mandate time off for

at least employees. Obviously self employed people are a different matter.

And then, in most companies you have to be there a year before you can get your first week of vacation. So if you keep changing jobs - laid off - you really get screwed.

There was only one company that I worked for that let employees starting accruing vacation days from day 1. So if the policy was two weeks per year, after one month you had 0.833 days..

Some 20 years ago we went on a cruise because this was the only place that I knew we would be free from email and phone calls. Those were the days..

[pitohui]

6. companies need to be monitoring these "workaholics"

the person who never takes time off even tho it's paid often has a secret, and the secret may involve embezzlement

awhile back a BIG new orleans law firm noticed that one of the partners had never taken any time off, turned out, this partner had embezzled MILLIONS of dollars and could never take time off lest someone else see the paperwork juggling and figure it out

[HERVEPA]

7. I can not understand workers who don't take their time off

I'm a contractor (computer programmer), and don't get paid for time off.
But hell, I'm only planning to go around once in this life, so I'll take the time now when I'm in good enough health to enjoy.

Note: I understand that there are financial reasons people don't take time off.

[ixion]

9. *sigh* it is not disdain... it is wanting to keep your job

gotta love that spin...:eyes:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Perhaps they see companies in their industry shutting down and

want to squirrel away as much money as possible before the ax falls on them, OR they wnt to be seen as a "good little employee" so that they'll be spared layoffs.

I'm SO glad to be self-employed.

[NeedleCast]

11. 21 Days Vacation, 5 Days Sick

leave per year.

My balance at the end of the year was 4 hours of vacation and .12 hours of sick leave. My boss told me I couldn't take .12 of day off. Bastard!

[aikoaiko]

13. Work just piles up if I'm not there to handle it.

:shrug:


And I hate playing catchup.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

14. I used to work in a busy law office

where you had to sort through tons of mail every evening until about 7:00 or 8:00 o'clock at night. It was "understood" that you would come in on Saturdays to work. And you weren't supposed to take any vacation time or sick days unless the boss did, which was never. My boss was a pretty wealthy man but a nervous wreck who was skinny as a rail, extremely paranoid, and who would blow up over the slightest thing. Three years of that unbelievable pace was enough for me.

[question everything]

17. And this is the problem. Bosses expect too much

and employees are afraid to speak up.

This is why we need a federal mandated time off, the way the rest of the industrialized world works.

I once had a boss who made it a point not to stay in his office after 5:00, or so, even though he would take work home. He said that he did not want to send a message that as long as he was in the office everyone else had, too.

[pitohui]

19. there is federally mandated time off

my husband works for a small company, believe you me, he doesn't get anything that is not mandated by federal law

there are a certain (very small) number of federal holidays, one of them we don't get because the feds allow us to take mardi gras instead, we don't get mardi gras AND memorial day both -- but if he is called out on these federal holidays then he is paid double time including the commute to the job site

there are also 2 weeks (10 days) of paid vacation time ea. year

you can't store these up over the years and then take off a year or six months of sabbatical like academics do, you've got use it or lose it, so it would be stupid to throw these days away and no one respects a stupid employee

indeed, as i said above, if an employee NEVER takes a day off, this is supposed to be a warning sign of a problem being covered up

i've heard of employees storing vacation days for years(but not at my husband's employer) and then taking very long trips, but i've also heard of changes in co. policy and some of those folks just losing the vacation time they didn't take from past years, all in all, it seems most unwise to try to put off a vacation for more than a year, use it by the end of each year, pretty easy, most years end in the christmas and new years holidays so if you haven't yet used your holiday use it then to see your family, that's what practically everyone does at his company

[tridim]

18. That sounds very familiar

At least I'm not alone.

[raccoon]

21. If this were the lounge, I'd start a copycat thread, "Sick Americans disdain medical care."

What a spin. :rofl:

[kimmylavin]

22. Daily contract.

My husband works under a daily contract.
If he has the nerve to ask for a day off, he gets "punished" by not being scheduled once he comes back.
All the guys he works with have had the same thing happen to them.

He got hell for going on our honeymoon...

[question everything]

25. This is worse than slavery

How did we end up a "24/7" workforce? (I hate this term..)

[devilgrrl]

23. 'Distain' my eye - people work like that to make up for the lack of pay raises the past 8 years!

What a pile of horseshit! Isn't the newspaper that article is printed in belong to Richard Mellon Scaife? Wouldn't surprise me.

[MindPilot]

24. I get 3 weeks a year, four floaters, and pretty much unlimited sick & personal time

But I dare not take more than a day or two at a time because it is not really time off. All that happens is my work gets compressed in the days before and after. Once I hit 200 hours of accumulated vacation time, I quit earning it, so not taking vacation is rewarded with a pay cut.

The bottom line is if my employer can do without me for a week; they can do without me for good. Ain't working in IT great?

[mattfromnossa]

26. Not me.

I am not afraid to take me some time off. :toast: