In France, every employee – from bricklayer to civil servant, and right down to the lowliest pot-scrubbing plongeur – is entitled to 30 paid vacation days every year.
Throughout Scandinavia, the minimum is 25 days; in other European Union countries, every wage slave gets at least 20, by law.
In Canada and Japan, it’s 10 days; in New Zealand and Australia, it’s 20.
As for the United States? Nada.
That’s right, not a single vacation day is mandated for workers in America, making us the only industrialized country in the known universe that doesn’t oblige employers to give their workers time off for leisure.
“The US stands alone,” says John Schmitt, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), who co-authored a 2007 study called “No-Vacation Nation,” lamenting this sorry state of affairs.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that nobody gets an occasional break. But first, it’s only at the employer’s discretion, which means no vacation at all for one in four workers, according to Schmitt’s study. And second, the usual two weeks is a pittance compared to what many of our neighbors in Europe and Latin America get.
And that’s not even to mention holidays. The average worker in Israel and in Egypt gets 16 of them, according to a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting; in Italy and Portugal, the law mandates 13.
Meanwhile, the average among Americans is a measly nine vacation days a year, and six paid holidays, according to the CEPR study.
It gets worse – nearly a third of American workers don’t even use all the time they’re given, revealed an Expedia.com survey. And the number who take a full week off at a time has declined by a third since 1990, according to the bureau of labor statistics.
All these numbers underscore Americans’ complicated relationship with vacations.
“Americans have never been entirely comfortable taking vacations,” says Cindy Aron, a University of Virginia professor and the author of “Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States.” “They’re conflicted about it.”
That conflict stems in part from the Puritan work ethic ingrained in our culture, says Joe Robinson, a life coach and the driving force behind the pro-vacation Work to Live Campaign.
“We’re programmed to believe that we only have value if we’re performing,” he says.
Continental divide
To be sure, the American vacation is not extinct. Amid the mobs of Europeans milling around Fifth Avenue, there are plenty of American tourists, too. And each August, offices around the city do seem emptier.
But clearly, when it comes to time off, there is a divide between the US and much of the rest of the civilized world.
Irene Kontje, a manager at a Manhattan nonprofit, found this out when she spent a year working in Europe and received four weeks off – modest by European standards, but a revelation for her.
“I was really struck by how sacred vacations are there,” Kontje says.
To her it was part of a different mentality about work that manifested itself in other ways – for example, she noticed that her colleagues generally left the office at a decent hour.
“The culture is saying to you, ‘We want you to be happy. We want you to have time with your family,'” Kontje says. “That was the message I saw.”
Many other US workers are likewise struck, says Stacie Berdan, an expert on international careers and the co-author of “Get Ahead by Going Abroad” – who further notes that a 35-hour week is the norm in many countries,.
“It’s so different from the American mind-set,” she says. “It’s all about trying to balance income and a healthy mental attitude – most Europeans believe that’s what vacations are for. People get used to that and really start to appreciate its value, and it can be difficult for them to come back.”
For Europeans working in the States, going from feast to famine calls for a similar adjustment. In Yannis Michailidis’ native Greece, August is considered holiday time. It’s not unusual to find Greeks taking three or even four weeks off this time of year, he says.
In New York, for the most part, it’s business as usual.
“It actually makes me very homesick,” says Michailidis, a neuroscientist.
When Michailidis came to the US for grad school a decade ago, he was allotted two weeks a year. Now, his job in academia allows him to return home to Greece for about three weeks at a time. He finds that extended time off, and the anticipation before vacations, are crucial for avoiding burnout.
But such long absences are a hard sell for many Americans. Only 14 percent take vacations of two weeks or longer, according to the Families and Work Institute.
“There’s something in the air here about taking shorter vacations,” Michailidis says.
When she moved to New York from Denmark four years ago, Catrine Giery had the same difficulty adapting to a paltry two weeks off, having left a country where five weeks is the legal minimum.
Giery has since switched jobs – and one factor that attracted her to her current position was its promise of five weeks vacation.
Needless to say, Giery is not working for an American company – she’s a manager for Visit Denmark, the Danish tourism bureau.
The difference between Americans and residents of less harried climes is writ large in the family of Emilia Sixtensson, a Swedish native who runs two Manhattan businesses, a telecommunications company and an event-planning venture. While her relatives back home get up to seven weeks off, her busy schedule adds up to “zero vacation,” she says.
She does get away from time to time, but when she does, her laptop always comes with her.
“I might go away for two weeks,” Sixtensson says, “but I never really completely go away.”
Which points to another factor that distinguishes US workers – the extent to which we tend to take work with us when we do get away. It’s something that can confound people from other countries, says Berdan.
“When they go, they really go on vacation,” she says. “They may check in periodically, but not the same as we do.”
Jennifer Garam, an office manager who founded Writeous Chicks, a writing program for women, says a normal vacation for her includes toting a laptop and checking email. Or it did until last year, when, realizing her work/life balance was out of whack, Garam decided to go on an e-mail- free vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.
To her surprise, Garam didn’t experience any withdrawal. When she went for walks on the beach, she even left her cellphone in her room. And she felt truly on vacation.
“I felt so good being disconnected,” she says.
Who’s better off?
Some activists concerned about our leisure deficit are pushing for a law that would put the US more on par with other developed nations. Robinson’s group, Work to Live, and another called Take Back Your Time are campaigning for a federal law that would require employers to provide three weeks off.
“Vacations do not have the feeling of legitimacy in this country because we don’t have a law that validates them,” Robinson says.
The way things stand, Americans are enduring “a leisure famine,” says Alison Link, a board member for Take Back Your Time.
“There has to be a movement,” says Link, who runs a city leisure coaching business called The Leisure Link. “It’s really going to take a paradigm shift.”
Robinson points to a 2000 study by researchers at SUNY Oswego that showed taking vacations can reduce the risk of heart attacks.
“People have to have this time,” Robinson says emphatically. “It’s critical for their health and for their lives.”
Arthur Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School and the incoming president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, takes a different view. Those who envy Europeans “have got it wrong,” says Brooks, author of a new book called “Gross National Happiness,” examining what makes us happy.
That’s because Americans don’t starve themselves of leisure time out of fear or self-denial. We work more because we like working, he says – and in that sense, we’re the ones who should be envied.
“Italians may get 42 days vacation, but if you look at the research it’s pretty clear that Americans are happier than Italians,” he says, crediting a society that allows people more freedom to choose what they do, and to switch jobs and change careers when they feel like it. “Happiness really is a full-time job.”
Brooks, who spent years living in Spain, cites research showing that 89 percent of Americans call themselves either satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs – and notes that it’s just as true of blue-collar workers as it is of intellectuals and business owners.
Meanwhile, he says, “if you quit your job in France, you’re unemployed until you die. It’s completely oppressing.”
Sixtensson, the Swedish workaholic, offers some evidence to back Brooks up. While it’s true she doesn’t get endless breaks like her relatives back home, the truth is that she doesn’t care. Tending to her two businesses makes her happy.
“It’s more by choice than anything,” she says. “Personally, I like to keep busy.”
To get some more insight into the vacation divide, @work decided to check in with the French, who are the world leaders of kicking back, with a mandated 30 days of vacation every year. So we rang the Alliance Francaise, a Manhattan-based language and culture institute, in search of French employees.
None were available, though. They were all on vacation.