The American vacation does a disappearing act
Perri Hankins, a volleyball coach at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, recently flew to Laguna Beach to spend 12 days with friends.
It was her first vacation in 15 years.
“I’m not so sure I can relax,” she said. “Right now there’s all that pressure with what [work] I’m missing.” She planned to keep tethered to her job by cell phone and e-mail.
Hankins’ is an extreme case of a larger phenomenon: the disappearing American vacation. U.S. employees work longer hours and get less time off than their counterparts in Europe and many other industrialized nations, statistics show.
Recent surveys suggest even more erosion. Some U.S. companies have stopped paying for vacations, and many workers don’t use the time they have.
This year 87% of employers are providing paid vacations, down from 95% in 1999, according to an annual survey released last month by the Society for Human Resource Management, a professional association of more than 175,000 members based in Alexandria, Va.
Americans plan to take 10% less vacation time this year than last, according to a survey released in May by online travel seller Expedia Inc. Twelve percent of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. respondents don’t plan to take any vacation.
On average, Americans get 16 days of vacation a year but take only 14 days, the survey showed. By contrast, workers in Italy average 42 annual days of vacation, the French get 37, Germans get 35 and Britons get 28, according to 2001 statistics from the World Tourism Organization.
Even the famously industrious Japanese get 25 annual paid vacation days and, according to the International Labour Organization, work about 100 fewer hours per year than Americans do. Only a handful of nationals in the labor organization’s 50-country survey, including Czechs and South Koreans, work more hours than Americans.
You could write a book about why Americans take so little time off. In fact, someone has.
Joe Robinson, a Santa Monica resident and former magazine editor, wrote “Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life,” which was released in January. He has also organized a petition campaign urging Congress to mandate three weeks of paid vacation per year.
Robinson and other experts note that in European nations, the law generally requires companies to offer paid vacations. The U.S. has no such federal law. So Europeans feel entitled to vacations, and Americans don’t, Robinson said.
Combine that feeling with Americans’ “overwork ethic,” by which we define ourselves by our jobs, and technology that makes for 24-7 schedules, and you have a recipe for what he calls “vacation starvation.”
Hankins, for instance, figured she was allowed at least two to three weeks of annual vacation, but until this year she didn’t take it. “People have to work too hard,” she said. She was already dreading the pileup of work when she returned.
Then there are the guilt and fear factors. A fifth of Americans say they feel guilty about taking a vacation, the Expedia survey showed.
“Employees feel guilty asking for the time, even if it’s on the books, and particularly when times are tough, since they know the boss would rather have a root canal than give it to them,” Robinson said. Even if no threat is made, workers may worry that they’ll be laid off or passed over for promotions if they take vacations, he added.
The prolonged recession has further cut into time off.
“When it’s an employers’ market, they’re in a position to eliminate or decrease benefits,” said Jennifer Schramm, manager of workplace trends and forecasting for the Society for Human Resource Management. With U.S. unemployment hitting a nine-year high of 6.4% in June, it’s not hard to figure out what type of market exists now.
Vacation starvation can result in disgruntled employees, stress-related illnesses and family tensions, experts say. Balancing life and work issues is regularly one of the top five factors in job satisfaction, Schramm’s surveys show.
When pursuing his vacation campaign, Robinson said, “I hear from 35-year-olds with heart attacks and families breaking apart” because of overwork.
Some employees are coping by taking frequent but shorter vacations. More than half of Americans’ leisure trips -- a growing number -- are four nights or fewer, according to Peter Yesawich, managing partner of Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell, a marketing firm based in Orlando, Fla.
Others are fighting back by faking illness. About 20% of Americans say they have planned on calling in sick on a Friday or Monday to create a long weekend, according to a survey of 1,024 adults conducted in May for online travel seller Orbitz.
That tactic is losing its effectiveness, however, because more than two-thirds of employers now lump sick days, vacation days and personal days into a single “paid time off” plan -- nearly double the number in 1999, Schramm’s survey showed. In other words, the days you call in sick are subtracted from your allotted vacation time.
There are other signs that workers are getting weary of the treadmill. More than half of Americans say they don’t get enough time off, and 29% say they’d trade a pay raise for more vacation time, according to a recent survey by Yesawich’s firm.
In what Yesawich sees as a “basic shift in social values,” younger people are even more eager for time off. Thirty-seven percent of adults younger than 35 in the survey said they would take more vacation over more pay, versus 15% of the 55-plus set.
Schramm’s surveys also suggest younger adults put a high value on vacations. In the long run, that is a source of hope for the overworked.
If the U.S. economy improves, which would give workers more clout, “I see employees asking for and getting more time off,” she said.
Jane Engle welcomes comments and suggestions but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.
