Dalam soal jaminan sosial (dan kesehatan) Amerika jauh ketinggalan dari
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Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
(CNN) -- Let's be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United
States is not the place to work.
Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets
two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world
-- much less than what people in many other countries receive.
And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.
Some U.S. companies don't like employees taking off more than one week at a
time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they're
lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains.
"I really would like to take a real, decent vacation and travel somewhere, but
it's almost impossible to take a long vacation and to be out of contact," said
Don Brock, a software engineer who lives in suburban Washington.
"I dream of taking a cruise or a trip to Europe, but I can't imagine getting
away for so long."
The running joke at Brock's company is that a vacation just means you work from
somewhere else. So he takes one or two days off at a time and loses some
vacation each year. Only 57% of U.S. workers use up all of the days they're
entitled to, compared with 89% of workers in France, a recent Reuters/Ipsos
poll found.
Brock's last long holiday was more than 10 years ago, when he took a two-week
drive across the country.
'Americans work like robots'
It's a totally different story in other parts of the world.
Nancy Schimkat, an American who lives in Weinheim, Germany, said her German
husband, an engineer, gets six weeks of paid vacation a year, plus national
holidays -- the norm. His company makes sure he takes all of it.
It's typical for Germans to take off three consecutive weeks in August when
"most of the country kind of closes down," Schimkat said. That's the time for
big trips, perhaps to other parts of Europe, or to Australia or North America.
Germans might also book a ski holiday in the winter and take a week off during
Easter.
Schimkat's family back in the United States teases her that she's spoiled. But
when she tells Germans that workers in the U.S. usually get two weeks of
vacation a year, they cringe.
"They kind of have this idea that Americans work like robots and if that's the
way they want to be, that's up to them. But they don't want to be like that,"
Schimkat said.
"[Germans] work very hard, but then they take their holiday and really relax.
... It's more than just making money for Germans, it's about having time for
your family and it's about having time to wind down."
No legal obligation to offer vacation
So what's going on here?
A big reason for the difference is that paid time off is mandated by law in
many parts of the world.
Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries -- from Australia
to Slovenia to Japan -- that require employers to offer four weeks or more of
paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human
resources consulting company Mercer.
Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.
But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer
any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access
to it, government figures show.
That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't
guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled "No-Vacation
Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.
Most U.S. companies, of course, do provide vacation as a way to attract and
retain workers.
But the fear of layoffs and the ever-faster pace of work mean many Americans
are reluctant to be absent from the office -- anxious that they might look like
they're not committed to their job. Or they worry they won't be able to cope
with the backlog of work waiting for them after a vacation.
Then, there's the way we work.
Working more makes Americans happier than Europeans, according to a study
published recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies. That may be because
Americans believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with
success, wrote Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, the study's author and an assistant
professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.
"Americans maximize their... [happiness] by working, and Europeans maximize
their [happiness] through leisure," he found.
So despite research documenting the health and productivity benefits of taking
time off, a long vacation can be undesirable, scary, unrealistic or just plain
impossible for many U.S. workers.
Little appetite for regulation
Critics say it's time for a change.
"There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a
competitive advantage," said John de Graaf, the national coordinator for Take
Back Your Time, a group that researches the effects of overwork.
He noted that the United States came in fourth in the World Economic Forum's
2010-2011 rankings of the most competitive economies, but Sweden -- a country
that by law offers workers five weeks of paid vacation -- came in second.
De Graaf drafted the first version of the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which
would have required larger companies to provide at least one week of paid
annual leave to employees. But the bill, introduced by then-Rep. Alan Grayson,
D-Florida, in May of 2009, got little traction.
Opponents said that it would have a negative impact on business and that the
government shouldn't get involved in the workplace in this way.
"You would have had the idea that we were calling for the end of Western
civilization. Comments like, 'Oh, they're going to make America a 21st-century
France,' as if we were all going to have to eat snails," de Graaf said.
"I'm in no way anti-capitalist, I think the market does a lot of good things,
but the Europeans understand that the market also has its failings and that
when simply left completely to its own devices, it doesn't produce these
perfect results."
But is more government regulation the answer? The debate rages on.
Back in suburban Washington, Brock -- the software engineer who hasn't had a
long vacation for more than 10 years -- is finally planning a real getaway. His
60th birthday is coming up in December, and he'd like to do something special,
maybe go on a cruise to the Bahamas.
Will he be able to pull it off and get away from work? He's still not entirely
sure, he said.
Links referenced within this article
are not obligated under federal law
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/workhours/vacation_leave.htm
No-Vacation Nation
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/2007-05-no-vacation-nation.pdf
Journal of Happiness Studies
http://www.springerlink.com/content/33078107768v8044/
Take Back Your Time
http://www.timeday.org/
World Economic Forum's 2010-2011 rankings
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2010-11.pdf
Paid Vacation Act of 2009
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2564
Find this article at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/05/23/vacation.in.america/index.html?hpt=Mid
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