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More Than Half of US Workers Didn't Use Up Their Time Off Last Year (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Americans, famously, take far less vacation time than their European counterparts: less than 17 days, on average, compared to 30 days in France, for example. But for many Americans, that's apparently all the time they need. More than half of all US employees (54%) didn't use all their days off last year, working a combined total of 662 million more days than required. Of those days, 206 million couldn't be rolled over or cashed out, meaning they were forfeited, costing the equivalent of $66 billion, according to a report (PDF) from Project: Time Off, a group funded by the travel industry. While it's a group with a strong interest in promoting more vacations, their findings are still revealing about America's unhealthy reluctance to take time off. Almost 60% of US workers who don't take their allotted vacation say they fear the amount of work they'll have to return to, according to the survey of 7,331 working Americans. Others (47%) say they stay put because they believe no one else can do their job, or because they want to impress their bosses with their dedication (36%).
US workers are absolutely terrified of taking time off lest it gets used against them in a review and they get fired and replaced at a moment's notice. How many people really think anyone at Netflix or elsewhere takes advantage of the ludicrous notion of 'unlimited holidays'? But hey, the American dream........
if we only had EU workers rights or an union!
In the EU they can't block you from taking time off.
A lot of other people (and myself) have combined leave (sick and vacation) hours. I don't use all my leave because you never know when you might be sick, and if you get laid off it's nice to have some extra money that you get by cashing in your excess PTO hours.
In the US, we reward hard work with promotions and higher salaries. In Europe, they just tax the wealthy while the six hour work days and bans on checking email outside of work decrease productivity. It's hard work versus socialism taxing successful people. One of these leads to a strong economy, the other to massive debt. There's no incentive to be successful in Europe, anyway, because the government will just take your money away with taxes to pay for ridiculous social programs that would be unnecessary if people just had jobs and worked 40 hour weeks.
- snruter rotsac
Either this post is ironic, or you are so deep in the tank you don't even know there's a tank.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
...and it's not because I love work.
The simple fact is that if I'm gone for a day, the amount of work I come back to is more than a day's worth.
-Styopa
Just because you "have" vacation on paper doesn't mean you can actually take vacation.
No. It means you should take vacation, which is a concept that fewer and fewer Americans can grasp or understand.
Some time away from the thing in your life that creates some of the worst stress and physical abuse would probably benefit an individual greatly. It would benefit an entire society greatly if that mentality were to become infectious, and help reset US workplace expectations and respect for what the hard working employees do provide when they are there.
Even if you could not actually afford to "go away" on vacation, just relaxing for a few days can have a considerable benefit.
That's because in America Gaslighting is the status quo especially in corporate America. It takes this form: "You are weak and should fear job loss if you don't work 80 hours a week." Basically, the labor shortage that was brought on by the Great Recession which was brought on by the Foreclosure crisis scared people to death. Corporate America wasted no time using this as an opportunity to terrorize the work force into being "more productive" with complete disregard for employee health. Also, this isn't really news. The good news is we are about to hit a boom cycle hopefully. Boom/bust economics folks.
We'll make great pets
That sounds like most of my Fortune 500 jobs. I can get everything done in the first hour and wait for stuff to roll downhill for the next seven hours.
(This is a generalization, I don't want to see hundreds of posts stating that they are the exception)
In general Americans will define themselves on what they do. When meeting a new person, one of the first questions asked is what do they do for a living. We use the answer of this question to help define and place themselves in society. Before you realize how unfair this is, other cultures, will make the same judgments based on family, religion, race, political standing, their dress, their car...
Being that what we do for work is a key part of our identity, we prefer to spend a good portion in enforcing and strengthening it. While the numbers show the opposite, taking time off, we get the perception that we will be considered lazy, not a team player, and not productive if we take too much vacation. So we usually keep these vacation days, not as vacation but as emergency time off days.
Also we subconsciously control our work environment so we necessary as an individual to the institution, and poorly sharing your information with other workers. So if you take time off, you get back with a weeks worth of work that you will need to do, being an other intensive to not take time off.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In the US, you're stupid. In the EU, we are intelligent. End of the discussion. Enjoy your shithole of a society, slave.
For those unfamiliar with the employer "benefit" of "Paid Time Off", it's a system where your "sick time" and "vacation time" are pushed together. So you get to make choices like "should I stay home with this fever/cold/bronchitis/stomach flu/kidney stone OR do I get to see my family at the holidays this year?" and "I already paid for that cruise, I'll just bring in four boxes of kleenex and power through". I get that PTO is an accountant's wet dream, combining all those liabilities into one column on the balance sheet. In reality, it becomes a fantastic way for everyone to bring their germs into the office and spread their sickness and being ineffective at work when they should be at home getting better, so they can see their family at the holidays. My employer says "if you are sick, stay home", and there's no number of "counted" sick time. Some years I've not taken a sick day, other years I've been out two weeks. It's not like kidney stones or bronchitis were the same as sipping a drink out of a coconut on a tropical beach, or that I planned it.
A lot of people aren't interested in simply sitting around the house, and don't have the disposable income to spend it on traditional airfare, hotels, extra tanks of gas, food out, and other "vacation"-ish activities. Yes, there are plenty of cheap (or free) things to do. But many typical 40-hour-a-week types already DO those things evenings and weekends all year long. Don't underestimate the "I can't afford a vacation anyway, and don't feel like sitting at home so I can have a really sucky following week catching up on my work" factor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's because you made your business about you instead of building a business that can work without you.
I consider myself extremely lucky to work for a company that lets vacation to continue to accrue no matter how much gets accrued. None gets lost to the annual purge like many companies. Still have to plan ahead to actually use it in significant amounts, but it's an option to keep it till you would even have a whole year of vacation built up. And bonus if I really want to I can "sell" it back to the company and get cash instead.
Those poor, abused millionaires!
After all that heavy taxing at the end of the day all they have left is their millions.
Would someone please think of the millionaires?
>In Europe, they just tax the wealthy while the six hour work days and bans on checking email outside of work decrease productivity
Nope. Having worked in both Europe and the US, I can confidently say that the high-performing people are equally productive. In Europe they actually go on holidays and take time with their families too.
My personal observations have led me to conclude that this american productivity thing is a total myth. It seems to me more about some fucked up 'I work harder than you' competition. When in reality you don't.
Not to mention the countless studies showing that working too many hours burns you out and decreases productivity in the long run.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-hours
Funny because US debt is about 20 trillion and EU 12 trillion. I guess all that vacation saving and hard work is not paying off.
Time you don't take off before you quit has to be paid out. Now, to make sure that your company CAN actually pay the time they "owe" you if you quit today and they go bankrupt the same day, your company has to stash money in government bonds to the tune of what they'd have to pay their workers if all of them went out the door today.
Calculate about, say, 25 vacation days per worker, for a workforce of, say 10,000. Let's be conservative and say that a day/person is about 100 bucks.
Can you see how companies can have a HUGE interest in their workers actually going on vacation, and doing it as early as possible?
I MUST spend my vacation every year. They now even made it a bonus-valued goal, not to spend my vacation days and letting them roll over threatens my annual bonus. And since March I get weekly reminders from HR that I still have 10 unplanned days and that beautiful days are coming up, and whether I don't feel like taking some of the upcoming Fridays (with Thu being a holiday) off to enjoy a 4 days weekend.
I kid you not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>"Almost 60% of US workers who don't take their allotted vacation say they fear the amount of work they'll have to return to,"
Yep, that is me. When I take off time to "rest and recover", I come back to an even more stressful mess. Not exactly restful. The only true time off I get is when others in the facility are also off at the same time... meaning holidays. Except most of the facility is still "open" 24/7/365 so even that is a shot-in-the-dark.
Would that mean that you are prohibited from vacationing in areas where you would not be reachable remotely, eg, camping in the mountains?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Either this post is ironic, or you are so deep in the tank you don't even know there's a tank.
Not that you could be troubled to even hint at why he's incorrect, and instead lazily attack the messenger.
No, I indeed could not be troubled. I gain no benefit from futile attempts to disabuse strangers on the Internet of their ignorant beliefs. But, since you bothered to respond, I'll count them down.
In the US, we reward hard work with promotions and higher salaries.
This is patently ridiculous. I hope I don't have to demonstrate the myriad examples of hard-working people not being promoted or getting higher salaries. Look at the people who clean your office, or pick your lettuce for examples.
In Europe, they just tax the wealthy while the six hour work days and bans on checking email outside of work decrease productivity.
Obviously Europe does more than tax the wealthy, and people work more than 6 hours a day (Yes, Sweden experimented with a 6 hour work day). Slightly reducing productivity (if a ban on after-work email even resulted in that) is not really a huge deal.
It's hard work versus socialism taxing successful people. One of these leads to a strong economy, the other to massive debt.
This is quite simplistic, I hope you would agree. Europe has a strong economy and the US has massive debt. I'm not saying Europe is better, or has no debt, or that the US is not hard working or does not have a strong economy. I'm just saying the OP has a very simplistic view of a complex interplay between business, labor, the social contract and the role of the state.
There's no incentive to be successful in Europe, anyway, because the government will just take your money away with taxes to pay for ridiculous social programs that would be unnecessary if people just had jobs and worked 40 hour weeks.
Again, this is ridiculous. There are many wealthy Europeans. This idea that taxation keeps people from being productive and building businesses, that they will just sit on their hands because taxes are just too damn high, is not borne out by evidence. The poster also ignores the fact that Capitalism has manifestly failed to provide for the majority of the population. Many people work 40 hours a week and still need social assistance. So the assertion that employing people at 40 hours will eliminate the need for social programs is just plain flat wrong.
As I said, the post is either sarcastic, or just stupid. I hope it is now more clear as to why.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
"Why do you pick up the phone?" would be my first question.
The next ones would deal with questioning your mental health...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My former colleagues in the USA were more concerned with NOT losing their job while on vacation than promotion or salary hikes. That was why they didn't take their vacation days. The thought of taking four weeks (20 days) holiday in one go was just not on their radar.
It is so easy to fire people in the USA compared to Europe. There are all sorts of legal procedures that you have to go through such as written warnings etc that firing someone for taking their legal vacation would not be allowed. If a company did it then they'd be breaking the law. The same goes for firing someone who is ill in Hospital.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Don't forget that's also 510M people Vs 325M people so per capita the US debt is about 2.6 times the EU.
well bob we have really have unlimited time out of the office but we want to be in for core hours for about 85-90% of the year. But some people like jay are in the office 125%-150% of the time and we want to be like jay on this job.
I have worked for roughly a handful of different companies in my IT career and vacation benefits were all over the map. I worked for the federal government once and we got a ton of vacation time. I really liked that and used it, but I remember having two older co-workers who would basically never take a day off because they were truly convinced that the entire US government would collapse if they were gone. Maybe they took 2 days at most of vacation. We had a program where you could donate vacation to fellow employees who had catastrophic illnesses (ie. cancer) and would be out a lot and they used to donate tons of vacation days to that.
I worked in the US office of a European company and we got European vacation benefits on a PTO system. I loved it and thought it was great. I'd still be working there just for the vacation time had the company not gotten rid of a lot of US employees in my city to save money.
My current employer is a US based Fortune 500 company who treats us pretty well in general, but on the downside they have acted like every vacation day we take is stealing from their very soul. No PTO here. We don't get sick leave, but if you are sick for a day or two, you can just stay home and get paid - no vacation time used. If you're out for, I think, 4 days or more, you have to go on short term disability. We got a new, younger CEO a few years ago and he bumped up our vacation time a little bit and they stopped acting like taking vacation was almost like killing the company, but still it will never, ever equal what I was getting with the US government or the European company. They severely limit how much vacation time we can carry over (5 days) and pretty much force us to burn it up. If you really just refuse to take a vacation you can just throw your days in the trash I guess, but I've never heard of that. We get a lot of reminders to use vacation time and there is a policy in my organization that encourages you to use your vacation so you are better rested. I've never heard of anybody having anything negative happen to them because they used vacation time, which is good, but I still wish they were more generous with the amount we get. A lot of US companies are like mine, and they're just not all that generous with vacation time, but at least when we do use it there is no punishment for doing so.
Personally, I don't use every single day of vacation because I'm never secure in my job. That's just the nature of the work we're in...if the MBAs ever get around to replacing us with someone cheaper, I'm out no matter how skilled and useful I am. We're only allowed to bank 5 days of vacation, but I tend to hang onto it because honestly that's an extra week of pay at a time where I might need it. The fact remains that the US is a very hostile environment to be unemployed in; unemployment insurance barely covers anything if you've had anything approaching a middle class job previously.
I work for an employer that treats people pretty well on balance...it's very true that there are a lot of sweatshops out there and people continue to work there for many reasons. Web startups and small businesses would probably be at the low end of the spectrum -- most businesses I've worked with in the small to medium category already treat non-family employees as "the help" and are extremely stingy when it comes to pay, time off and benefits. Web startups are their own brand of crazy because everyone's hoping to win the IPO or buyout lottery. At the other extreme end of the spectrum, I know a lot of people who work for the state and can actually bank all of their sick and vacation time, to be paid out at the end of their service. Most people use this windfall to buy into insurance that will last them through their retirement...and along with their pension they are able to enjoy a worry-free retirement just like the old days.
Most people I work with are older and fewer management "tricks" work on us. But, there are still plenty of younger domestic workers who haven't learned that employers will take anything they can from employees and fall into the trap of working crazy hours. I'm by no means a clock-watcher; my employer routinely gets tons of "free" work out of me, but I do this because they also offer me a lot of flexibility. Everyone's trade-offs are different; I trade off raw salary for better retirement benefits, a shorter commute and a better ratio of home to work time. Other workers might just want the money regardless of how bad the work environment is, or they may trade off even more salary for a more stable job working in something like government, or they absolutely have to work for the hottest Silicon Valley employer. I do think employers should staff accordingly so that people can actually take time off from work -- so many places I've seen will only hire one person skilled in some job function, effectively chaining them to their desks or slowing down everyone else when they do need to be off.
I would explain, but I'm on vacation.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
In some other country, our unions fought hard for us to have proper holidays. Now I take 2 (two) 15-days off, paid, during the year. We also have a 33% bonus added for spending during vacation. I take 15-day at every 6-month and come renewed for working even harder. Would never accept to work as a horse in US receiving carrots for that. My off-life is more important than work, always.
Americans are raised brainwashed. Corporate culture has spread into the workers (the last place you'd imagine.) People brag about how little vacation they use - it's a point of pride! Letting work get into your private life is also the norm; the opposite of Germany where it's illegal to email you on vacation. Also we all cheer when "productivity" goes up completely unaware of what that usually means and how shallow those numbers usually are. The idea that jobs/employers/capitalism exists to provide work so people can have a better life has completely died off... we are supposed to worship the "job creators" and quietly sacrifice jobs and wages on the alter of the almighty "job creators." The classic argument for capitalism is dead-- which is a socialist argument btw; the very selling point has gone and only mindless dogma remains. It's like the Star Trek reboots, or putting a MacOS theme on Windows-- it's shallow stuff to fool simple people.
People also fear (often wrongly) that they will be harmed in some way for using their rights.... but we also have almost no rules for firing in this country unless you are a minority or a woman with a lot of proof; HR is designed to come up with legally safe ways of doing illegal and immoral acts. Other countries with different rules do not allow you to easily be fired for some political bumper sticker (actual true story around here.)
The sole purpose for business in the USA is to maximize profits, the important aspects of providing jobs with some purpose have been forgotten and attacked dogmatically. As robots take over more people will wake up to the old ideas. We already have many demanding tariffs and ending free trade deals (most those people are only partially awake and unable to argue against the BS economists who always preach for the status quo, who are like televangelist preachers.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
There's a problem in your employment relationship, and it is likely really holding your career back. If it's the company, you should leave and find an employer who is less dysfunctional.
If it's not the company, then it's your own attitude.
Companies certainly are never perfect, but in general they operate in their interest, which in general is keeping their strong people happy. I worry about my strong people leaving all the time -- as I'm falling asleep at night, on weekends, etc.
There's also a group of people that is just good enough that they're still here, but I don't worry at all about them leaving. I guess that also could be a potential explanation for what you're experiencing.
Boy, it's great to work in an industry where you have the option of leaving one job and being hired in another job in short order, sometimes even at a higher salary. In the US, in many sectors, I think most people are hanging on as best they can to a dysfunctional job because if they quit, they'd be like their out-of-work relatives who have been looking for a job for the past two years.
If the boss was reasonable, this would not come up in the first place. If you talk it over with them then they will just not like you, and you will move up a slot on the potential redundancy list. Do not waste time talking to a bully unless you have power.
Getting a job elsewhere wont work. If the industry you are in had job openings then you would not have this problem in the fist place. You will find similar attitudes in other related employers, and moving will just look bad on your resume.
But the good news is that if you say Yes Sir often enough, and smile as you are being beaten, then you may eventually become a boss, and then be able to inflict pain on others. It will seem normal and the right thing to do, because you have been on the receiving end for so long.
The solution is political. Join a union (secretly), even though it costs you a little money. Join the Democratic party, and contribute -- yes you will only have a tiny influence, but that is better than none at all.
And stop voting for people that will make America great again.