US Employees Are Vacationing More Than They Have in Over a Decade (wsj.com) 97
There's a big reason airports and resorts are booked up this summer: Americans are taking off work and vacationing more than they have in over a decade. In some cases, their employers are forcing them to. From a report: The pandemic, along with jitters about a potential recession, dampened U.S. workers' eagerness to take paid time off in recent years. Now, many vacation-bound employees say they're over such worries. More working adults took vacation days in the first half of 2023 than they did in prepandemic years, according to data from the Labor Department.
Company vacation calendars show more workers are checking out, and for longer stretches, this summer. The number of employees logging vacation days climbed 11% in June compared with the same month in 2022 and 20% compared with June 2021, according to human-resources technology firm Gusto, which tracks time-off requests from workers at more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses. The amount of time they took off also rose, by 5% from last year to an average 32 hours.
[...] Many executives say they are also getting away for longer breaks, even if they don't fully unplug from work. In a July survey by executive search firm Korn Ferry, 53% of the nearly 300 professionals polled said they planned to take a longer summer vacation this year than in years past. While a quarter said they never connect with work while on vacation, half said they do so once or several times a day.
Company vacation calendars show more workers are checking out, and for longer stretches, this summer. The number of employees logging vacation days climbed 11% in June compared with the same month in 2022 and 20% compared with June 2021, according to human-resources technology firm Gusto, which tracks time-off requests from workers at more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses. The amount of time they took off also rose, by 5% from last year to an average 32 hours.
[...] Many executives say they are also getting away for longer breaks, even if they don't fully unplug from work. In a July survey by executive search firm Korn Ferry, 53% of the nearly 300 professionals polled said they planned to take a longer summer vacation this year than in years past. While a quarter said they never connect with work while on vacation, half said they do so once or several times a day.
Wow (Score:3)
OMG, four whole days of vacation!!!! The SKY is FALLING!!!
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
That's ridiculous. I'm north of the border, and in Canada we are under-vacationing by European standards... and I have 160 hours of paid vacation. When I left my last job, I had 240 hours, so that was a cut.
American's put up with a lot of unreasonable shit... but you should at least get reasonable vacations to decompress from dealing with it.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
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That page doesn't accurately reflect China. After 35 years of age they get mandatory unlimited unpaid vacation time.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't worry, as long as they have access to TV and the internet, that danger is pretty limited.
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I have 240 hours accrued, the problem is not how much we get in benefits, it's how hard it is to use it, and how much extra work you have to do when you attempt to leave town. It's often more stressful to take that vacation than to just stay at work depressed.
Then there's the cost, and the fact that those of us in Texas absolutely must take an airplane to go somewhere that isn't a shithole, and airplanes are themselves terrible these days.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not necessarily, my job is also my hobby, I get paid to do what I like. I take vacations now that I have children, but before I didn't see the need to take many weeks off.
I work in the US, so I get more vacation than the mandatory vacation periods I got while working in Europe (hint: negotiation is better than beating someone into submission), but now I get to go home early whenever I want, take a break whenever I need to without all the complicated legal framework around "vacation reporting".
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Most people can find a job that is also their hobby, they off course have to know what that is and willing to sacrifice for it. Many people confuse hobby with sports/entertainment, hobbies are constructive, entertainment is not.
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Fuck all that. You can't ever get that time back.
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The drive itself is part of the vacation. You're missing out. Skip the plane and get behind the wheel.
The only thing shitty about Texas is the current weather. There are plenty of decent places to go on vacation there, especially if you're a hiking/rock climbing/mountain biking nut. Probably not a good idea to go out in the middle of July/August though.
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That's ridiculous. I'm north of the border, and in Canada we are under-vacationing by European standards... and I have 160 hours of paid vacation. When I left my last job, I had 240 hours, so that was a cut.
American's put up with a lot of unreasonable shit... but you should at least get reasonable vacations to decompress from dealing with it.
TFS's statement is ambiguous. I suspect they're saying the average duration of a single contiguous block of time off has risen 5%, to 32 hours (which still is kind of short).
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Well, that's better... but not good. Anything under a week (bookended with weekends) seems like not enough time to really benefit you.
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Oh, if it's blocks of four days, it makes sense. People often try to take time off near a long weekend so you do get the weekend book-ends.
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Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's not that we put up with it (Score:4, Interesting)
Elon Musk famously said CEOs work 100 hours a week, which is hilarious because he was "CEO" of 4 companies at the time, admitting that at most being CEO is a part time job. Younger folks (Gen M&Z) know he's full of it, or at least most of them do, but they can't do anything about it. My kid works 50+ hours a week and would do more if their body would hold up not because of any moral imperative but because they don't make enough money to pay their bills, even with a relatively modest life. $2000+ a month for a one bedroom in a neighborhood where you car doesn't get broken into all the time it rough. You can add roommates but unless their family (or friends so close they might as well be family) sooner or later they're probably gonna flake out on you. Had that happen when they were in college and suddenly had to come up with an extra $1200/mo for rent/utilities.
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You know...if your kids are in the US...there are LOTS of other states/cities where the cost of living is NOTHING like as expensive as you express here.
Hell, if you don't wanna buy, there's plenty of places where you can rent a single family dwelling, 3 bedrooms, covered off street parking (garage or
No jobs (Score:2)
People, kids and adults, live where the work is.
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Well, I guess it depends on your work vocation/industry.
I've done IT work most all my adult working life...and have found great work all through the south east of the US....good pay, great jobs, friendly people safe areas AND, low cost of living.
You may have a misconception of living outside of NYC, L.A., Silicon Valley, etc....the big urban places.
There's lots of good paying jobs all over the US...
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How many Rust positions are open in your town?
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Well, in the areas I've lived in...check out around the Knoxville, TN area, lots of IT in the tech corridor area there. In Alabama, there's a huge tech area there in the Huntsville area....there's tones of tech in Texas and you can get a lot of house for your money there, etc.
That's just a few areas in the SEC that I know about....but geez, not everything tech is in CA or NYC or big urban areas.
I've been contracting for decades making good bucks in the SEC pr
Not so much (Score:2)
Human beings don't just build for shits and giggles, we build where the work is. And where the work is will be one of a few places:
1. Near a river or port (assuming drought hasn't made your river too shallow to move freight).
2. Near a factory, mine or farm.
3. A city.
#1 tends to be expensive to live in. For #2 we shipped most of the factories overseas, certainly the kind that can supp
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There's a lot of place along the MS river my friend.
NOLA is a huge port city and between here and Baton Rouge, th
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Gen Z has found ways to do something about the shitty work situation. "Quiet quitting" is one strategy, just work to rule and don't do any more than you have to, while working on finding a better gig or your side hustle. Unions are starting to become more popular with them too.
They seem to have realized that they owe their employer nothing. Just like their boss will discard them without a second thought, they view jobs as mere stepping stones on to something else. There's no loyalty from either side.
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Elon Musk famously said CEOs work 100 hours a week, which is hilarious because he was "CEO" of 4 companies at the time, admitting that at most being CEO is a part time job.
No. Elon Musk being a CEO is a part time job. You can see this in that his job exists entirely of mouthing off and paying others to clean up his mess. Many CEOs do actually work, ... still don't justify their insane paychecks, but don't ever assume that Elon Musk gives you any definition of "normal" for any topic you could ever dream up of.
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There's likely a LOT of other Americans that do like I do....and take vacation when they have a paid holiday during the week....so as to get the day paid off, but y
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Four days of vacation -- in June. One month. Not the whole year.
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OMG, four whole days of vacation!!!! The SKY is FALLING!!!
I wanted to take more time off but Karen at work complained that it would overlap her vacation time :))))
wow, four business days... (Score:2)
32 hours, or four business days (perhaps two if the shop is a 996 shop)... wow.
Compare that to Europeans who have motorhomes and parks where they drive to somewhere remote (remote for Europe that is), and set up a camp for weeks to months on end. To boot, Europe is on parity with the US when it comes to productivity.
Does this show Americans are better workers? Not really. It just shows that people in the US can be slave-driven harder than even medieval peasants who, even in one of the most brutal times o
Re:wow, four business days... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember:
No National Healthcare (which means they have to work in order to make sure they have money to not get sick (lest they become homeless) unlike in most of the world, there is..
No Higher level College (free) which means they have to work to pay off student debt.. unlike in many parts of the world.
Higher litigious structure which means more risk at law suits so most try to keep money available to pay for frivoulous lawsuits.. unlike many parts of the world
No national pension. The US has a Social security system that has been being threatened to be eliminated which means retirement is solely the domain of the individual (which means many people have to still work in their 70's and even 80's simply to survive).
So the US has a structure that requires people to be indentured servants virtually from birth until death.. unless they get lucky..
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Keep in mind, US workers in many cases, CAN'T take time off.. ...
So the US has a structure that requires people to be indentured servants virtually from birth until death.. unless they get lucky..
Speaking as an employer, I try to encourage my staff to use their time off, I didn't craft a benefit to go unused. I have to practically order them to take vacation. If my high-IQ technology employees, with good 401(k)s and plenty of accrued time, struggle to use their vacation benefits, it seems exceedingly unlikely that it's because they are worried about national pension plans.
On the other hand I can easily be convinced that the US culture may be quite a bit more influential on peoples use or not of vac
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I'm not at the moment hiring, but my business philosophy is to find creative smart people, and hang onto them for dear life because the distribution of technical ability is either very lumpy (think bi-modal) or heavily skewed towards the left side of the graph!
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Do the employees not taking their vacations have the problem of work piling up when they're gone? More than once over the years I've not taken time off because a week off just means an 80-hour week when I get back. (And yes, I know how hard that is to manage when your workers are uniquely skilled, not plug-compatible components.)
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Hell no. If they’re not paying me overtime, they get 40 hours a week when I get home from vacation too. Never, ever, work for free. You’re worth more than that, so are your friends and family.
So far this year, I’ve had 5 weeks of. 1 week of skiing in February, two weeks where I went to the Caribbean to go diving, and two weeks sailing. When I get home, there’s a day off plowing through my email, but that’s on company time not mine.
But when I’m working, I’m working h
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On the other hand I can easily be convinced that the US culture may be quite a bit more influential on peoples use or not of vacation benefits.
It is cultural.
Most of us were comfortable taking a long weekend here and there, maybe a mid-week day off to go to our kids event (ball game, play, musical performance, etc.), but our longest vacation would usually be taking a week off. One week. Nine days. Four weekend days, five business days -maybe just four business days and a holiday. Back to work and catch up on what we missed.
Then he pandemic hit, and we got sent home for a while. It changed people's outlook on being away from work. Life goes on
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It's indoctrination. The US is the best country in the world, so the US system must also be the best.
Socialism is painted as some kind of monster, to the point where it actually scares a lot of Americans if they even get a whiff of it.
I see some signs of that changing with Gen Z, but they aren't organized or mobilized enough to really do much other than complain.
Anyway I'm off for 5 weeks over new year, and the UK isn't very socialist at all.
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Keep in mind, US workers in many cases, CAN'T take time off..
You're only reading one stat there. The USA does have the lowest level of mandatory vacations and employee protections in any western country I'll give you that, but they also have the highest percentage of untaken accrued leave.
Even people in the US who CAN take time off, don't. Because they wouldn't be seen as a team player. Meanwhile where I live I get ostracised for the fact that I have accrued vacation days. It's just not normal for people to not take their full 37 days where I work.
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Does this show Americans are better workers? Not really. It just shows that people in the US can be slave-driven harder than even medieval peasants who, even in one of the most brutal times of world history, had more time off.
Umm... it's pretty likely that the EU's passion for time off, and all the other mandatory benefits, does actually have a cost, regardless of the actual productivity of the workers - in any rational discussion of tradeoffs you might want to look at actual relative/comparative economic output between the US and EU to decide whether the US really is a hell-hole of "slavery" vs. the EU utopia of "freedom":
The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine. Spaniards are stinting on olive oil. Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive. Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades and the once-booming market for organic food has tanked. Italy’s economic development minister, Adolfo Urso, convened a crisis meeting in May over prices for pasta, the country’s favorite staple, after they jumped by more than double the national inflation rate.
Europeans Are Becoming Poorer [wsj.com] according to the WSJ the key cause is that while the EU economy has grown 8%
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Sure Europeans are finding the balance in their economy but I highly doubt any of them look at the ever more splitting disparity between American "economic growth" and the health and wellbeing of your average American.
Sure the US has some excellent economic growth but a large majority of that generated wealth ends up at the top in the shareholder class. That's a big reason why even with these absurdly rosy economic numbers a good amount of Americans "feel" the economy is in a bad spot. Wages are on the ri
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Sure the US has some excellent economic growth but a large majority of that generated wealth ends up at the top in the shareholder class. That's a big reason why even with these absurdly rosy economic numbers a good amount of Americans "feel" the economy is in a bad spot. Wages are on the rise but a great many people do not get to partake in the economic bounty.
I'll grant that unequal distributions of growth exist, but you need only look at what happened between 2018 and 2020 (pre pandemic) to see that overall economic expansion CAN result in benefits for the broad population, even as a significant amount of that growth ends up in the "wrong" hands. The specific distribution, and the exact cause-and-effect mechanism is not as clear since the practical process is some kind of chaos-like interaction between regulation, law, competition, and politics.
On the other han
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overall economic expansion CAN result in benefits for the broad population
Agree but I don't think that comes about from general "market forces" but as you mentioned the interplay between markets and regulations. While the exact outcomes are somewht difficult to determine, economics is a "soft" science afterall I think through obvservation recently and through the 20th century that direct stimulus helps alleviate the top loaded nature that capital markets naturally gravitate towards and provide an overal economic lift by distributing wealth more equitably.
economic system to be nearly flat relative to other economies
Not what I am advocating
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So how do you explain that Americans are also feeling a significant pinch and are being forced to cut back?
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You should consider that 32 hours is only for non-exempt, non-union employees (entry level). The statistics do not count salaried, contract, self-employed and unionized employees as they by definition have more flexible hours and negotiable vacation periods.
Almost anyone making $50k+ in the US is not represented in that statistic.
Vacation (Score:1)
I'm not saying it should be the law .. but I think humans should try to negotiate 12 weeks off every year. Some teachers get that, don't they? I reckon..
7 week summer vacation (2 or 3 destinations).
1 week off Thanksgiving.
2 weeks off Christmas.
2 weeks misc shit/family events.
You'll probably have to blow like $20K on it though depending on family size/accomodations etc. Would be nice if the economy could evolve such that most people can get that if they choose.
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Second, people already take off the week of Thanksgiving and many, particularly government employees, already have off the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Third, fuck Christmas. You want to have your religious holiday, have it. Don't penalize the rest of us. Also, it would be a violation of the Constitution to do it for one religion and not another. But hey, if you want
Re: Vacation (Score:2)
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I think you missed the moment when, for large parts of the western world, Christmas stopped being primarily about religiosity. I think it's great to have a nearly universal single holiday, and I don't mind that it's December 25. I have friends from the a few places in middle east who all schedule family get-togethers then, even though they are decidedly not Christian.
Sure, in some people's experience Christmas is about religion... but despite a large extended family who have been Catholic my whole life, I d
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Grinch here, I don't like Christmas at all mainly due to the social impact of everybody wanting to vacation at the same time. It puts tremendous strain on our transportation networks, since everybody has got to go somewhere else to be with family for the holiday. It also does weird things to the consumer market, making shipping of ordered items slower and less reliable, prices go up just to be marked down at what they were before, advertisers go nuts and are relentless, and the music is annoying too.
Also,
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I forgot to mention that gift exchange is stupid too. Anything I want I already own, or can't afford. If I can't afford it, neither can anyone who would consider buying gifts for me. So we all wind up buying each other token gifts that have no intrinsic value and are just a mutual waste of money, and wind up in a landfill.
So anyway, yeah, I am a Grinch.
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Re:Vacation (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't begrudge the teachers that time off. I technically work "harder" than a teacher does... but you could not pay me enough to deal with the stress that increasingly shittier parents and students bring. In North America they are criminally underpaid. We demand they be psychologists as much as teachers, insist they provide stability, strip them of all authority and any tools they have to maintain that stability, judge them harshly at every opportunity, and freeze their wages until strikes are needed. Every bitching parent who's substandard little pinhead of an offspring feels slighted is one more nail in the coffin of the profession.
I'm glad they do it. I can't. Take that summer off - you earned it.
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If you live in an area where problem children are removed from the system, I think that's great. But I do not think that is the usual outcome. Instead, the problem bounces around administration, and ultimately nothing is done. It gets mired in the dead zone between the people impacted, and the people with authority to actually do anything, and it dies there.
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I technically work "harder" than a teacher does...
Do you? I'm married to a teacher. I don't think what she does is hard. I think what she does is LONG. At 5pm I clock off and any problem is someone else's problem. Except dinner, that's my problem because the wife will be sitting in front of the TV either preparing lesson plans, marking exams, writing exams, marking assignments, fighting with the printer or some other work shit that occasionally keeps her up to the point where her work doctor diagnosed her with burnout.
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Some teachers get that, don't they?
No teacher gets 12 weeks off. They don't have classes for 12 weeks, that's not the same thing. What they do outside of class time is their choice: They can slack off for 12 weeks and then spend every school day working until 10pm because they don't have lesson plans for the day after, or they spend the 12 weeks diligently preparing for the following semester. Wifey is in Australia on holiday so she's definitely in the former category this coming semester, so there's our evening social activities ruined for
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Can't she use last years lesson plan? Wouldn't that work for most subjects?
Dante (Score:3)
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I was not expecting how the third movie went.
Re: Dante (Score:2)
Negotiate for it, before you start. (Score:2)
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Not relevant. The issue here isn't that people don't have enough paid vacation, it's that in the USA people don't take the days they have. You can negotiate all you want, unless you actually don't go to work it doesn't matter.
Moving average (Score:2)
what's vacation? (Score:2)
The only time I take off is when I am sick and serious family issues. Otherwise, my vacation/pto time is saved for emergencies.
Can we see that compared to before the pandemic? (Score:2)
Because that people go on vacation now more than they did when they were pretty much locked in, that's kinda a given, ya know...
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WFV (Score:2)
we had like 2 years off (Score:2)
Preparing for the next lockdown (Score:1)
That's because noboidy took a vacation for 2 years (Score:2)
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It's also worth noting that use it or lose it only applies if the employer either tells the employee when to take their vacation or there is otherwise the opportunity for one.
Because of pandemic there was no opportunity, this might not have been the employer's fault, but the onus would have been on the employer to still tell the employee to take time off, or provide payment in lieu of missed vacation.