It's Labor Day weekend in the US, but ever more Americans are too busy to take a break. Others aren't even allowed them. Anna Mundow reports
It is Labor Day weekend in the US, a final spasm of recreation for millions of Americans who return to work next week rejuvenated by a foreign holiday or a cross-country road trip. Pass around those holiday snaps. This is me at the Grand Canyon, me at the Pyramids.
That is the myth. Statistics tell a different story. About 13 per cent of US companies no longer provide paid leave, an increase from 5 per cent in 1997. One in four US workers does not take an annual holiday. Those that do typically receive about eight days after a year in a job or about 10 after three years. And a third of those lucky drones take work with them on holiday. The figure rises to almost six in 10 for managers.
Expedia, the Internet travel company, found that Americans intended to take 10 per cent fewer vacation days this year because of "too much work". Each year US workers hand back to their employers €17.5 billion in unused holidays.
Cue the litany of economic causes: downsizing, global competition, a shrinking economy. Remember that the US is the only country in the industrialised world without a minimum-paid-leave law, that only 13 per cent of Americans are unionised and that the Bush administration is doing its best to scuttle the 40-hour week by rewriting overtime regulations.
But other forces are operating. "Work is identity for most Americans," says Joe Robinson, author of Work To Live, a rallying cry for workers to reclaim their lives. "And over the last 20 years the work ethic has been hijacked by the overwork ethic, an insidious blight that has left millions of Americans exhausted, depressed and in deep despair."
In the wake of Enron and other corporate scams, some wage slaves have begun to question the "senseless piling on of hours to drive the stock price high enough so the brass can cash in astronomical stock options and bonuses". (The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay quadrupled between 1980 and 2000, from 42 times worker pay to a boggling 500 times, according to the Los Angeles Times.) Robinson receives hundreds of e-mails a day from discontented workers supporting his online campaign for at least three weeks' paid holiday for all Americans.
But revolution is hardly imminent. Not with clubs such as Workaholics International Network proclaiming that "most workaholics are winners" and agencies such as Workaholics4Hire.com asking: "Do you have a project that should have been done yesterday?" A Stars and Stripes logo reinforces the company's message of overwork as patriotic duty.
"This is a deeply neurotic country that runs on guilt, fear and greed," Robinson says of this pseudo patriotism. "Yet we have a centre-of-the-universe syndrome and shrinking vacations make us even more provincial. One of the reasons we wander into mistakes as a nation, after all, is because we have a tremendous fear derived from ignorance of other cultures. It's no coincidence that only 8 per cent of US citizens possess a passport."
Fear is a powerful motivator in a jittery economy. Take too many holidays or sick days and you might become dispensable. Protest your workload or leave the office before 9 p.m. and you will be considered a wimp. No wonder a third of US workers eat lunch at their desks.
It goes deeper than that. Change your job or forfeit your promotion and you lose your identity, your status, the approval of your peers and the virtue associated with constant activity. One of the fears is that if they were not constantly working they would probably have to deal with the deeper issues of life, says Diane Fassel, author of Working Ourselves To Death.
Ask achievers in the US how they are. The stock answer is "busy". Busy is good. Happy would be pathetic.
An acquaintance boasted last month of answering 400 e-mails on the first day of her summer "holiday". My editor at the Boston Globe, explaining apologetically that he was taking a fortnight off, added that he was bringing his mobile phone along and would probably "drop into the office" during the second week.
Americans are also working to feed their voracious consumer appetite. Average individual spending in the US has shot up over the past two decades while involvement in local politics, sports and other community activities has plummeted.
"Overwork is turning us into an ever-lonelier land of strangers," Robinson notes as he lists the disorder's social, personal and medical effects: diminishing family and friendship ties, shrinking political and civic involvement, increased risk of heart attack, stroke and stress-related illnesses. A study at the State University of New York found that men who took an annual holiday lowered their risk of heart disease by almost a quarter and their risk of heart attack by almost a third.
A rested worker is also a more efficient worker. Robinson cites European vacation laws and productivity rates to bolster his argument for longer holidays, less overtime and even office naps. (An increasingly popular solution in the US is the Spent Tent, designed by a Kansas City architectural firm to be set up in a quiet corner of the office as a retreat for exhausted employees.)
Technology, however, reinforces the opposite desire for constant communication, frenzied activity and the dubious elation of meeting an invariably false deadline. "We used to mail manuscripts to our authors and ask them to return corrected copies in two weeks," recalls an editor with 30 years' experience in publishing. "Now we automatically send everything by overnight delivery, expecting an instant turnaround. And that takes away your thinking time."
Ironically, when false urgency becomes the rule even the most conscientious worker becomes a little cynical. "When you do the impossible once, they expect you to do it again, so you try not to come through all the time," the veteran editor confesses.
"But that goes against the grain if you take professional pride in your work. You want to do justice to the author and the reader."
Robinson recently took his Work to Live campaign to Washington, where he won some bipartisan political support with his economic arguments for saner working practices.
"When people travel within their own countries they spend money," says Robinson. "The Chinese - great capitalists that they are - figured this out a while ago and extended workers' vacation time. At the same time the tourism industry in this country is dying, partly because Americans don't have the time to travel."
Robinson's argument may become increasingly persuasive as the so-called war on terrorism expands, further isolating the US internationally and increasing the tourism industry's reliance on the domestic market.
The US has been here before, of course. In 1910 President William Howard Taft recommended a two- to three-month annual holiday for US workers. In 1936 the Department of Labor called for national vacation legislation.
"But wages have historically played a bigger role than time off in US labour negotiations," Robinson maintains. "Crudely put, where European workers valued time off, Americans valued money."
The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, established the 40-hour week, but even that benchmark faces erosion.
Next month the US Senate will debate White House legislation already approved by the House of Representatives that would turn anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a salaried employee who can be required to work unlimited overtime for no extra pay. That means you, the teenager flipping burgers, the immigrant emptying bedpans.
Robinson urges all workers to know their rights and asks compulsive workers to get to know themselves. "The job doesn't make you," he says, "your nature does. What we'll be remembered for is our humanity, enthusiasm and individuality . . . not how many weekends we worked."