In the recently published “Vacation Deprivation” survey, the fifth of a series of annual surveys, Expedia.com®, a leading international online travel service, finds that American workers have a general inclination to under use the opportunities for paid vacations to which they are entitled, “with each employed US adult anticipated to leave an average of three vacation days on the table this year.” The survey observes the same pattern in the behavior of Canadians workers.
The relatively low rate of vacations among American workers, suggests Dr. Helen Jorgensen in a study titled “Give Me A Break: The Extent of Paid Holidays and Vacation,” is explained by the failure of the American system to provide laws guaranteeing workers’ holidays or vacations. This situation is in stark contrast with the well-known benefits that European workers enjoy on average.
In her study, Dr. Jorgensen, an economist affiliated with the DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, suggests that, across Europe, there is a serious commitment to ensuring that workers have a significant amount of paid time off (which ranges from Finland’s 39 days of paid leave, to the Netherlands’ and United Kingdom’s 28). Indeed, a Directive of the European Union (Article 7 of the E.U. Directive 93/104/EC) establishes that workers enjoy at least four weeks of paid vacation per year.
On the other hand, as reported in the 2003 U.S. Department of Labor’s statistics on “Employee Benefits in Private Industry,” American workers in the private sector enjoy two weeks of paid vacation on average. In addition, those American workers who work on “national holidays such as Labor Day, are not entitled to extra pay,” adds Jorgensen.
As the debate about workers’ entitlement to paid vacation time lends itself to be the mirror of the broader discussion about the role and appropriate size of the welfare state in society, experts’ positions on the issue are extremely diverse.
A Matter of Strong Work Ethics
“The problem with vacations is not related to the available number of vacation days” says Michael Tanner, Director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based Think Tank. “Let’s just think about the fact that one third of Americans do not take the vacation time they are entitled to.” In order to understand why Americans end up working on average a higher number of hours and days than their European counterparts, “we need to look at the strong work ethics of American workers,” argues Mr. Tanner. On the other hand, if we look at Europe, we see that “the inflexibility of its labor market has diminished European productivity.” Tanner suggests that differences between American and European approaches to labor are affected by “culturally longstanding trends.” He also argues that “going back to about 20 or 30 years ago, we find that the United States and Europe had similar amount of work per person. Since then, though, that amount has been constantly diminishing in European countries, while constantly increasing in the US.”
Labor Rights Erosion
Silvya Allegretto, an economist affiliated with the DC-based Economic Policy Institute, and one of the co-authors of the study “The State of Working America 2004/2005,” focuses on the often forgotten importance of leisure/labor trade offs. Dr. Allegretto argues that the wrong-headedness of current American welfare policies is shown by the fact that even in those European countries characterized by a higher level of unemployment and extensive social benefits for the employees, many sectors experience higher productivity than in the United States. “The idea that spending quality time away from work is a value per se is not very popular in the United States.” Yet, she contends, “the price that workers pay in terms of social welfare in order to achieve productivity levels that are slightly higher than the Europeans is very high.” “Living standards are an important part of the equation too and American workers would need stronger rights to enjoy a quality life.” Instead, Dr. Allegretto argues, “we live in a society that has witnessed a constant erosion of labor rights by private business interests. In a healthy democracy and free economy it’s important to have a continuous push and pull between big business and labor.” However, in the United States “the biggest burdens have shifted on the shoulders of labor: productivity has increased, but real wages are falling behind inflation, and while profits for corporations are very high, income inequality has increased and social mobility has not changed that much over the past three decades.”
US Workers Are Satisfied!
Sam Kazman, General Counsel of the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, expresses a different take on the issue. Kazman argues that American workers not using all the vacation time available to them are “a good indication of the fact that our system works very well.” Those data about leaving vacation days on the table by American workers also tell us that “employees do not have a shortage of vacations, the same way once you don’t finish what you have in your dish, it is harder to prove that there’s a food shortage or that you’re hungry. American workers are satisfied.” On the other hand, Mr. Kazman argues that “the big problem in the European Union is the overabundance of government control. Even companies and employers that would like to produce more or work longer hours are hindered from doing so by law.” But where do the differences between European and American attitudes toward vacations stem from? “More than being related to different work ethics, we find that lower income taxes are an incentive for American workers to look for additional income, rather than additional vacations,” Kazman argues.
Certainly, the debate about the importance of paid vacations for American workers provides a useful prism through which to look at the ongoing broader discussion about the status of the welfare state in the United States. As such, debate unavoidably involves the question of what direction American society should pursue in its future developments, the compelling but divergent strengths of the arguments here presented suggest that there are no easy answers at hand.
