The official end of summer is approaching, signaling the end of peak vacation season and the return of the working masses to the daily grind.
But many of us aren’t trudging back to work well rested from a couple of weeks of lying on the beach.
Increasingly, Americans loaded with work are forgoing their vacation time and clocking more hours on the job, widening the disparity between the U.S. and other countries where vacations are mandatory and often stretch to a month of idle bliss.
The trend has heightened the hand-wringing over overworked Americans whose health, lifestyles and productivity diminish the harder they toil. But the oft-touted American work ethic continues to push those driven by ambition or necessity to scrap their time off to pursue a better life.
Rick Weil, a 34-year-old investment banker living in Bucktown, is one such vacation waster.
He takes less than half of the vacation days he’s allowed, works even when he does get away and makes do with three-day weekends in lieu of longer breaks. He hasn’t taken a full week off in three years.
Weil, who has a 2-year-old daughter, said he would love to take more vacation for the sake of his health, family and social life, but there’s just too much work thrown in his direction, and getting it done pays off.
“The harder I work, the more opportunities I have and money I make,” said Weil, who works at least 11 hours a day, travels heavily and gets back pain from it all. “I’m doing it now so I don’t have to work myself into the grave when I’m older.”
Part of the reason for wasted vacation is that many people see it as an unnecessary luxury.
The U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not require employers to give workers paid time off–vacation leave, sick leave or maternity leave. It’s up to employers to design vacation policies, and about 25 percent of U.S. workers get no paid leave at all, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Initiatives like Seattle-based Take Back Your Time and Santa Monica, Calif.-based Work to Live are lobbying for a federal law mandating that employers give at least three weeks of paid leave annually, and hope the issue enters the political discussion in the run-up to midterm elections.
“There does seem to be an attitude that only weaklings take vacation,” said John De Graaf, national coordinator of Take Back Your Time. “If there were a [minimum-leave] law, there would be much more of a sense that this is my right.”
In France, Austria and Denmark, employers are mandated by law to give employees at least 25 days of vacation a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In Italy, Germany, the UK and Belgium the mandate is 20 days.
Working Americans get, on average, 14 days of paid vacation, and a third can’t even wrench themselves from their cubicles long enough to take all of them, according to expedia.com’s annual vacation survey.
The average U.S. employee will let four vacation days go unused this year, up from three days last year, the poll found. People in countries with more generous vacation policies, meanwhile, typically don’t let more than one or two vacation days escape, Expedia found.
A big reason for the policy difference is that labor unions are much stronger in Europe than they are here, while the business lobby dominates in the U.S., said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
Culturally, it might be a matter of priorities: Europeans may prefer to be rewarded for their work with vacation, while Americans like having one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world and are willing to work longer to get paid more, Allegretto said.
Even in Japan, long considered a nation of workaholics, people don’t work as much as Americans do. Japanese workers clocked an average of 1,789 hours in 2004, the most recent statistics available, compared to 1,824 for Americans, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
For some people, competition is fierce, and staying at their desks is a matter of survival.
Robert Dooley, 26, works in sales at a stock photography company in the South Loop that evaluates him monthly against his co-workers. Take time off and you fall behind, he said.
Dooley, who lives in Old Town, says he hasn’t taken a full week of vacation since he started working at the company two years ago, but he knew what he was in for.
“It’s kind of the standard in corporate America,” said Dooley, who is allotted 14 vacation days a year. “But I do get burned out.”
Even people who make their own hours give up vacations in favor of productivity.
Terri Boyce, 29, a realtor with Dreamtown in Lincoln Park, said she passed up a trip with her brother to Tybee Island in Georgia because she had to show properties.
“When you take a vacation it’s time that you’re not making money,” said Boyce, who lives in Avondale. When she does take breaks, she said, her BlackBerry comes with her because she’s afraid she’ll “miss something.”
Technology has not only made it harder to leave work behind, but also to leave in the first place.
“Technologies that are supposed to free our time really have just made us work faster,” De Graaf said. “People return from vacation and have 300 to 400 e-mails.”
It’s that pileup of work that dissuades Lynese Kelley, 45, from taking long vacations from her job at a non-profit downtown. Kelley instead takes long weekends, emblematic of a trend to shorter vacations. According to the 2006 National Travel Monitor, 75 percent of all trips average three to four days.
“It’s that fear of what’s waiting for you when you come back,” said Kelley, who lives on the Far South Side and, after seven years with the company, gets 15 vacation days. “You take small snippets so you don’t get far behind.”
But Kelley’s vacation days won’t join the 574 million Americans will waste this year. She plans to take two weeks over the winter holidays so she can spend them with her two college-aged children.
“Oh, I’m going to use it,” she said of her precious time off. “I’m not giving that away.”
AMERICANS ON VACATION
Americans got more vacation days this year than last but let more of those precious days go unused. Here’s a glimpse of how generous–or overworked–American employees are, according to the 2006 Expedia survey:
14 days of vacation received, up from 12 days last year
4 unused vacation days per person, up from three unused days last year
574 million: Total unused vacation days in the country
$75.72 billion: Value of the unused vacation days nationwide
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BY THE NUMBERS
Americans can’t seem to leave their work behind, and the problem is worse this year than last, according to expedia.com’s 2006 Vacation Deprivation survey. Of the American adults surveyed:
33%
don’t take all of their vacation days, up from 31 percent last year.
38%
work more than 40 hours per week
23%
check work e-mail or voice mail while vacationing
19%
have canceled or postponed vacation plans because of work
16%
will take a two-week vacation this year
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
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RITA REDEYE
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