Welcome to America, the Land That Vacation Forgot
While it’s no news to anyone who runs into European travelers entering the second month of their time off work, the United States is pretty stingy about giving people vacation. Legally, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research reminded us last week in a reported entitled “No-Vacation Nation Revisted,” there is no national law requiring employers to offer holidays or vacations as there is in every other industrialized nation. We do have unpaid family leave—it’s even paid in a few places—but there too the U.S. is out of step with the rest of the rich world. Individual employers, of course, can offer what they choose.
Not surprisingly, the report notes that lower-wage workers, part-timers, and those at small businesses are the least likely to have bosses who offer any vacation or paid holidays. All told, according to information gathered by the liberal-leaning think tank, 23 percent of working Americans get no paid vacation or paid holidays, and the average from those who do get some time off is “less than the minimum legal standard set in the rest of the world’s rich economies excluding Japan (which guarantees only 10 paid vacation days and requires no paid holidays).” Yay, American drones beat Japan’s fabled salarymen!
There are moves to bring the U.S. up to speed. Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida, just happened to introduce the Paid Vacation Act as the CEPR report was making headlines. His bill—I say we dub it ObamaCares—initially offers a pretty modest one week off with pay a year for workers at concerns employing at least a hundred people. Three years after the putative law takes effect, that would rise to two weeks, and for those laboring at places with at least 50 workers the one-week-a-year provision would kick in.
Grayson’s bill also calls for a simultaneous study on how this mandated time off affects workplace productivity, public health, and psychological well-being.
Given the howls that accompany every effort to raise the minimum wage, including the Obama Administration’s current proposal to push it to $9 an hour, and the melodrama accompanying the Affordable Care Act, I predict rough sailing for any attempt to require the private sector to offer new benefits. (Hell, we can’t even hold the line on the existing ones.)
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http://www.psmag.com/culture/welcome-to-america-the-land-that-vacation-forgot-58821/
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