Labor Day means the unofficial end of summer
– and vacation time. As Americans settle back into a
work-frenzied pattern, some are wishing for more days off
With Labor Day comes the unofficial end of summer – and the unofficial end of vacation time – until the holidays. Kids go back to school, colder, wet weather returns and airfares drop because the busy season is over. As South Valley residents settle back into the work-work-work routine, many may be wondering: Where the heck did my vacation time go?
“When I book people’s vacations, I find that people who go to Europe generally go for about 10 to 14 days, and people that stay within the U.S. tend to book for about seven days,” said Vilma Pinheiro, owner of Caravelle World Travel in Gilroy. “That’s how Americans do it. We go, go, go. We hardly take any time off.”
Multiple studies prove that Americans take very little vacation time. Compared to most European countries, our vacation time is almost nonexistent. According to a 2005 study by the Families and Work Institute, 14 percent of employees take vacations that last two weeks or more. About 40 percent take vacations that are seven or fewer days.
In Europe, 5 percent of people have 10 or fewer days of annual vacation, according to a study by Monster Worldwide, the company that owns and operates the career Web site www.monster.com. The majority of European workers – 61 percent – receive 26 or more days of vacation per year.
“I think it’s sad that we have such short vacations compared to Europe,” said Maria De Leon, an associate planner for the city of Hollister. “I think our culture sometimes values more work than more family time. If our employers did allow for more vacation time, I think everyone would benefit. Families would have more time together, time to connect and bond with your kids, and you have time to wind down. I think in the end, when people are rested and happy, they’re more productive employees.”
Aside from potentially making family units stronger and employees more productive, the studies show that workers’ health is at stake, too. The Families and Work Institute study reports that one in three American employees are chronically overworked, and 54 percent say they have felt overwhelmed at some time in the past month by how much work they had to complete. The study also showed that more than twice as many overworked employees experience symptoms of clinical depression compared to those who are not overworked.
“It’s hard to fit in vacations. My husband and I have to juggle our jobs, our kids’ schedules. We have two sets of grandparents living with us, so it’s difficult to set aside the time,” De Leon said. “But we plan two vacations a year, and we make sure we never skip them. We plan one week for just my husband and I to get away, and one week for the whole family to go somewhere special together. We just need that time away.”
Years ago, when Morgan Hill residents Bruce and Judy Henry’s children were in school, vacations had to be carefully planned. Bruce worked in the corporate world, and Judy was a stay-at-home mom.
“Our kids were involved in sports, and Bruce only had a certain amount of vacation time, so sometimes we only had a certain two-week window of time open that we could use,” Judy said. “And even then, sometimes it was hard to get Bruce’s idea of a vacation in sync with my idea of a vacation. When I was a stay-at-home mom, the house was my workplace, so I didn’t want to stay at home. If I was at home, it wasn’t really a vacation for me because then I’d want to fit in a little cleaning here or a couple of chores there. For it to be a vacation for me, we had to go somewhere. For Bruce, he would have been fine at home.”
Though Bruce said he could understand why many people would want longer, European-like vacations, he made the point that some people would see four to six weeks of vacation as undesirable.
“There are two ways to approach a vacation,” he said. “Judy can just hit the pause button. When she’s on vacation, she’s on vacation. For me, it’s hard to hit the mental pause button. I want to check my e-mail or phone into the office. It’s hard for me to mentally check out of work. I’ll think about it and worry about the mess I’m going to go back to at the office. If I were out of the office for four weeks, I’d be worrying about work most of that time, and that’s not really a vacation.”
Both Bruce and Judy now work as independent contract Realtors for Alain Pinel Realtors in Morgan Hill. Planning vacations has become much easier, they said, and they enjoy taking longer breaks from work. They recently returned from a three-week trip to Ireland.
“A large part of the vacation differences comes down to cultural differences,” Bruce said. “In Europe, things shut down for weeks, and everyone takes a vacation at the same time. There’s no work piling up and there’s nothing happening because everyone is gone. That just doesn’t happen here in the States. We’re such a multicultural society; it would be very hard for us all to get on board and shut down for a long period of time like that. We’re known as being a fast-paced society, and I don’t see us adopting the European views on vacation any time soon.”
