Joe Robinson, 18 August 2003, AlterNet
In the early '90s, Juliet Schor first called attention to skyrocketing work weeks and declining free time in her book, The Overworked American. In the decade since that groundbreaking work appeared, things not only haven't gotten any better -- they've grown worse. We're now logging more hours on the job than we have since the 1920s. Almost 40 percent of us work more than 50 hours a week. And just last month, before members of the House of Representatives took off on their month-plus vacations, they decided to pile more overtime on working Americans by approving the White House's scrapping of 60 years of labor law with a wholesale rewrite of wage and hour regulations, turning anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a salaried employee who can be required to work unlimited overtime for no extra pay.
Vacations are being downsized by the same forces that brought us soaring work weeks: labor cutbacks, a sense of false urgency created by tech tools, fear and guilt. Managers use the climate of job insecurity to stall, cancel and abbreviate paid leave, while piling on guilt. The message, overt or implied, is that it would be a burden on the company to take all your vacation days -- or any. Employees get the hint: one out of five employees say they feel guilty taking their vacation, reports Expedia's survey. A new poll of 700 companies by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance provider, found that 56 percent of workers would be postponing vacations until business improved.
The whole neurotic vacation system is based on guilt, on the notion that you are never worthy enough to take time off. The guilt works, because we are programmed to believe that only productivity and tasks have value in life, that free time is worthless, though it produces such trifles as family, friends, passions -- and actual living.
But before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation.
But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the U.S. and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways. Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now, we are the only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law. Europeans get four or five weeks by law and can get another couple of weeks by agreement with employers. The Japanese have two legal weeks, and even the Chinese get three. Our vacations are solely at the discretion of employers. The lack of legal standing is what makes vacations here feel so illegitimate -- and you so guilty when you try to take one.
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