by Tula Connell, Jun 26, 2006

It’s summer, and that means another Expedia.com survey to remind us how few vacation days most workers get in the United States.

The global online travel agency’s sixth annual “Vacation Deprivation,” survey found, no surprise, that U.S. workers receive the fewest vacation days per year on average compared with other major industrialized nations. The survey cites 14 days as average for an American worker, a number that doesn’t include federal holidays. But citing 14 days as an “average” figure also minimizes the extent to which millions of workers get no paid vacation, even while working two or more jobs.

In fact, 25.5 million private-sector workers in the United States do not have paid holidays and 22.2 million private-sector workers have no paid vacation, according to a survey of benefits by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Work at Avis car rental? No paid vacation. Tend to our elderly in many of the nation’s nonunion nursing homes? No paid vacation.

In this corporate mind-set economy, where workers are getting further behind even as they work longer hours, musing about the “vacation gap” may seem like fretting over not having a garden when you can’t even afford a house.

But the nation’s current profit-above-all mentality that keeps low-wage workers from getting paid time off is the same that prevents middle-class U.S. workers from receiving paid family medical leave, paid sick leave, retirement security and affordable health care.

Paid sick leave, for example, is a luxury in this nation.

Nearly 60 million workers go without paid sick leave and only one in three workers has paid sick leave to care for sick children, forcing more than 85 million workers to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for their families.

When faced with the vast gap in paid days off between Europe and the United States, corporate bosses typically respond with scenarios of lost productivity. But guess what: Union workers, who often get more paid vacation than nonunion workers, also are more productive.

Unions are working to change this greed-first economy to one where all U.S. workers have the fundamentals: paid sick leave, health care, retirement and time for their families.

Even a day off.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article | Comments (0)