The history of labor and work is long; the history of not working is short. Paid downtime, vacations and leisure are, for the vast majority of working folks, perks of the post-industrial age. Clearly, Melville’s whalers, Dickens’ sweatshop workers and Sinclair’s meat-packers knew nothing of holidays and personal days off.
What many of us now take to be a standard part of summer–time off, travel, organized play–was, until recently, the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy, landed gentry and the nouveau riche. It is only since World War II that the general American workforce has taken to the roads en masse, spent quality time with the kids in a cabin in Connecticut or traveled to Europe and beyond. And only since the success of Disneyland has the travel industry committed itself to the goal of offering every man, woman and child in America the opportunity to spend two weeks on the Love Boat cruise of their choice.
Although the concept of vacations is part of our general cultural expectations, it is not a reality for every worker. According to a 2001 report by the American Family Institute of New York, one-quarter of the American workforce does not take a regular vacation, two-thirds of people who earn $10,000 or less a year take less than one week off per year, and day workers, who regularly experience “enforced time off” when not hired for the day, take zero planned vacation days off. And let’s not forget George Will’s assertion that 40 percent of working Americans work even when they are ostensibly at play, staying in daily contact with their offices by e-mail from their cabins and by cell phone from their canoes.
The American Family Institute says its survey shows that too little vacation has immediate and long-term consequences both for the employee and the employer: stress, burnout, lack of focus, increased mistakes, diminished creativity, troubled relationships on and off the job, disruption of sleep and health problems.
Garrison Keillor, author and National Public Radio host, wrote an essay complaining about spending too much of his life working. Back when he was a kid, said Keillor, he spent his summers picking potatoes at a neighbor’s farm. It was dusty, tiring, boring work, but he kept at it because he was ashamed and afraid to complain or quit. He had been told that work was a challenge, a duty and a demonstration of manliness. He was warned that if he quit work, his life would lose meaning and purpose and he would be unable to bear the shame. So, he said, he spent a lot of years dutifully working at one thing or another.
Finally, however, after achieving fame, fortune, success and open-heart surgery, he has begun to change his mind. “It’s a lovely life, doing nothing,” he wrote. “God never intended for me to work hard. I can see that now. . . . I worked hard for years out of plain fear and ignorance and also to impress women and have the funds to take them to restaurants that serve poached salmon with a light saffron sauce on a bed of roses . . .”
Joe Robinson, former editor of the adventure-travel magazine Escape, agrees with Keillor: We have to work less to be more, says Robinson. We perversely allow downtime for machinery for maintenance and repair, “but we don’t allow it for the employees.”
Americans’ most hazardous work-related illness, says Robinson, is vacation deficit disorder or vacation starvation. Mind you, Robinson, entrepreneur and business owner himself, is not against the work ethic; it’s the crazed overwork ethic, says Robinson, that needs a pink slip.
In the summer of 2001, before the horrors of Sept. 11 and its aftermath, the nation was scandalized by the behavior of its new president, George W. Bush. He did not raise the collective eyebrow for any of the reasons his predecessor regularly shocked us. But he did shock and surprise us: He went on vacation for a month.
The pundits had a field day with it. “For an employee who’s been on the job just eight months, George W. Bush certainly is not shy about using his vacation benefits,” opined the Tribune. “Most of us,” declared one slightly outraged radio commentator, “get a week off after one year, two weeks after two, and if we work for a so-called benevolent company, maybe we get three weeks after 10 years on the job! So what’s with him?” A Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans thought the President should not take more than three weeks of vacation. And lots of other people, in my own informal poll, told me that the presidency was too important a job to take 30 days off. Actually, he revised his plans and only took 27 days.
The reality, of course, is that President Bush was on a vacation in name only. Though he left Washington for his Texas ranch, played golf and had some friends over for a barbecue, custom and statute required that he be briefed daily on domestic and international affairs. He had with him at least a skeleton staff of advisers and aides who brought him work that wouldn’t wait, and, as always, was trailed by a military aide carrying the “football,” a briefcase containing the access codes necessary to launch a nuclear strike.
The president’s time off was, at best, a “working vacation.” He spent time cutting brush and doing chores around his ranch. He put in a couple of hours pounding nails for Habitat for Humanity. He went to New Mexico for the first day of school. He made a nationally televised speech on stem-cell research. He pressed the flesh with locals around Waco, Texas. And he talked to local farmers and corn growers about the new global agricultural market.
Bush is our first MBA president and he has been consciously conducting himself in office as a CEO of a very large business firm. I think his first vacation was a perfect extension of this CEO model: He spent his vacation multitasking. According to a survey by the American Management Association, CEOs and senior executives may travel far away on vacation, but they’re never far from the concerns and problems of the workplace. Some 26 percent will be in daily contact with their offices while on vacation, and two-thirds will check in at least once a week. Of these, 34 percent remain in touch by e-mail and 52 percent rely on cell phones. As one CEO put it: “You just keep doing what you do, just from a different location.”
Well, maybe the president of the United States and the CEOs of Fortune 1000 firms are bad examples of what we mean by going on vacation. But are there any good examples anymore? Can people go away and stay disconnected, even for a while? Is the new model for vacationing the Gateway computer ad that features a woman working her laptop while paddling a kayak?
My point is a simple one: Even if we love our jobs–find creativity, success, and pleasure in our work–we also need not to work. No matter what we do to earn a living, we all seek the benefits of leisure, loafing and just lying around. It is my hope that we will learn or perhaps relearn two fundamental truths regarding the human situation: 1) Adults need work in the same way that children need play in order to fulfill themselves as people. 2) Adults also need play in the same way that children need play in order to fulfill themselves as people.
