Don’t We All Deserve a Month’s Vacation?

With the exception of teachers, rock stars and now the U.S. president, almost every other American worker would be fired for taking a monthlong vacation after a mere seven months on the job.

Joe Robinson hopes to change that.

This week the Santa Monica-based writer and activist will forward to members of Congress the 40,000 signatures he has collected online in support of Work to Live, a campaign he hopes will result in a change in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act “so that every American who has worked at least a year gets three weeks paid leave, increasing to four weeks after three years.”

“If the president of the United States can take a month off,” said Robinson, “I don’t see why the rest of us can’t.”

Robinson, 50, does not begrudge the president his 30-day respite--actually a “working vacation”--from the White House. Instead, he said, “I salute him for it. This long-held myth that we can’t stop because everybody will get ahead of us, I think [Bush is disproving] it. Who’s got a more involved job than the president of the United States?”

Nearly all industrialized nations have laws requiring vacation time--the United States does not. While most American employers give their staffs vacation in acknowledgment that the break makes for happier--and more productive--employees, they are not legally obligated to do so.

For most Americans, there is no vacation at all during the first year of a new job. Those who have been at their jobs long enough to accrue significant vacation time may not use it because many employers disapprove of long leaves.

Americans, on average, get nine days paid vacation after one year on the job. The growing ranks of part-time and temporary workers receive less--if any. Employees of large temporary employment agencies usually must work 1,500 hours (or 37 weeks) in a 12-month period to be eligible for one week of vacation pay. Most smaller employment agencies don’t pay for vacations at all. As for independent contractors, they’re on their own in deciding if and when they get a break.

Australian, Japanese and most European workers, however, get between four and six weeks vacation each year--not only as a standard practice but because it’s the law.

Most of the French get five weeks, perhaps spending it in August, along the coast, sipping Perrier on the beach or at a snug country home. Australians, the world’s greatest nomads, also get five weeks--enough time to globe trot on five continents. “What we’re saying is that this policy works in other parts of the globe,” Robinson said. “We’ll see if [Bush] preaches what he practices.”

Escaping the 100-degree humidity of the nation’s capital for the equally hot but dry Crawford, Texas, may not be most Americans’ vision of an ideal vacation.

But Gene Kilgore, author of “Ranch Vacations” (John Muir Publications), thinks Bush made an excellent choice. “The ranch experience today is the perfect complement to the high-tech environment in which we live,” he said. “Whether we’re presidents of countries or presidents of companies ... we need places to go where we can enjoy the outdoors, to enjoy nature, to have some time out.”

It’s hard to say what inspired the president to take such a breather. Perhaps he saw the light during his recent trip to Italy, where residents take six weeks vacation each year.

It was world travel that inspired Robinson to come up with the idea for Work to Live.

While writing a story for Escape, an adventure travel magazine he published from 1993 through 2000, he said he “bumped into so many Germans and Australians off for weeks on end, and I was always jealous.”

“I started thinking, ‘How come they can do this, and we can’t?”’ asked Robinson, who for the last year has been collecting signatures online at https://www.escapemag.com. Meanwhile, he’s writing a book on Work to Live for Putnam.

Last year, before spinning off the idea into a petition drive, Robinson wrote an article called “Vacation Starvation.” At that time, the presidential campaign was in full swing, and he was trying to rally support by talking to the candidates.

“All of [their] staffers were very supportive” of the idea, Robinson said. “That’s one thing I found--that this issue crosses Republican and Democrat. Everyone seems to realize that there’s just not enough time.”

Whether Congress or the president himself will formalize that into law remains to be seen.

In the short term, the possibility of such a bill being passed is slight, according to Lonnie Golden, who is an associate professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University and a consultant on Work to Live.

But in the long term, he said, “when we talk about a regulated work week, it’s important to bring in the context of vacations and to maybe set some sort of minimum national standard, like you have with a national minimum wage.”

Is more vacation going to make the lives of Americans any less stressful?

“Absolutely not,” said Paul Rosch, a cardiologist who now heads the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, N.Y. He says stress is about control over what you do, not about time off.

“If you come home to your wife and say, ‘We’ve got four weeks [off],’ and she says, ‘That’s great. I’ve always wanted to take a tour of Italy and go to museums,’ but you’d rather go fishing, if you wind up in Italy, you’re not going to be a happy camper.”