Work to Live/Live to Work
More and more Americans feel they are punching a time clock that never stops, leaving them scrambling to bring up kids, care for elderly parents and perhaps do some triage housekeeping. That explains why President Bush’s decision to take four weeks off has led many Americans to wonder, “Don’t we all deserve a month’s vacation?”
Americans do take far fewer vacation days than citizens of other developed nations: an average of 13 a year, compared with 25 in Japan, 28 in Britain, 35 in Germany and 42 in Italy. The typical U.S. husband and wife work 500 more hours per year than they did in 1980, and that doesn’t begin to capture the pressure brought on by ever-more-invasive technologies like cell phones and pagers.
Some vacation activists--to employ a contradiction in terms--are urging Congress to loosen the time vise and set some sort of minimum standard for days off, like the minimum wage. Santa Monica-based journalist Joe Robinson plans to send Congress 40,000 names he collected online in support of legislation giving workers three weeks’ paid leave. But decades of attempts to effect similar policies have failed because, for better or worse--in fact, for both better and worse--the work ethic is so deeply ingrained in U.S. culture.
Europeans have a different sort of social contract with their governments, and it’s a mixed blessing. They generally enjoy higher wages and benefits but also have higher unemployment rates and taxes. Their union contracts bar their employers from, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts it, “negotiating a relationship with employees” that can swiftly respond to market needs.
Although Robinson’s petition stands little chance of resulting in a law, Congress should at least help the most time-crunched Americans of all: low-income families in which both parents have to work and can’t find good day care for their children. Legislators can begin easing life for these particularly harried Americans by preserving the $200 million that President Bush has proposed cutting in the Child Care and Development Fund block grant, which helps low-income families get quality child care.
There are Americans who do have a choice about whether to stay on the fast track, but few of them decide to get off. That’s why the executive who quits to teach civics is news. There is probably at least a bit of truth to the old saying that Europeans work to live, while Americans live to work.
