Time-Starved Workers Rebel - Escape magazine posts petition to Congress for more vacation time - Statistical Data Included

Workforce, Oct, 2000 by Jennifer Laabs

There's a movement afoot to help weary workers put an end to grucling hours and endless days without vacation time. The editors at Escape magazine (www.escapemagazine.com) recently put a petition on the publication's Web site that readers can sign and send to Congress. The petition urges lawmakers to amend the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 so that every American who has worked at a job for at least a year gets three weeks of paid leave, increasing to four weeks after three years, just as Europeans do. Eastern Europeans and Australian employees enjoy an average of five weeks off a year.

According to the Employee Benefits Research Institute in Washington, D.C., the increasingly global economy has workers scrutinizing and comparing U.S. employment practices with those of the rest of the world. Many countries currently have a legally required minimum number of vacation days: France has 25; Brazil, 22; Japan, 19; and Hong Kong, 7. The United Kingdom and the United States don't require a minimum number of vacation days.

So, after serving for 10 years, most Americans at large U.S. companies get an average of 17 days off, while small-business employees with 25 years' tenure get only 16 vacation days, according to Escape magazine. The average? Just over nine days of vacation per year. And none of it is mandated by law.

"Escape magazine believes it's time to do something about skyrocketing burnout and America's most hazardous work-related illness vacation deficit disorder," the editors write in their explanation of why they want to fuel their "Work to Live" movement. "We've formed 'Work to Live' because enough is enough," they state. "We hope you will join us in our campaign to change the insane burnout track we're all on and get the time we need to travel, explore, find your family, yourself."

It's not difficult to understand why a magazine dedicated to leisure-time pursuits would be interested in furthering such a movement. But, biased as Escape might be, it probably has a point. America does have the highest work-hour rate, at 2,000 hours (per employee) a year. That's two weeks longer than in any other industrialized nation, even higher than in Japan, where they've coined the term karoshi for a worker who drops dead from overwork after an aorta or blood vessel in their brain explodes. In Japan, karoshi is now second only to cancer as a leading cause of death. A group of lawyers even set up a Karoshi Hotline in 1988 to help victims who were filing compensation claims with the government.

There isn't currently a government hotline (1-800-BURNOUT, let's say) for overworked Americans. But there are signs that U.S. workers are being time-starved, even with all the work-family balancing that American firms have been implementing over the past decade. Or have they?

The most recent survey about work and family issues by the New York City-based Families and Work Institute (www.familiesandwork.org) found that family-friendly benefits actually hadn't improved significantly in the previous five years. According to the institute's "1998 Business Work-Life Study" (the most current available), today's jobs are more demanding than ever. It found that employees today spend an of average 44 hours per week working--six more than they're scheduled to work. Among employees who work at least 20 hours a week, the number of hours spent on the job each week has increased an average 3.5 (from 43.6 to 47.1) since 1977. In addition, many workers say they have to work very fast (68 percent) and very hard (88 percent). One in three employees brings work home at least once a week, an increase of 10 percent over the last 20 years. The number of employees who would like to work fewer hours rose 17 percentage points over this time period. Sixty-three percent of Americans want to work less, up fr om 46 percent in 1992.

In addition, the survey found that many workers experience stress and negative spillover from work. Nearly one-fourth of all employees often or very often felt nervous or stressed; 13 percent often or very often had difficulty coping with the demands of everyday life; 26 percent often or very often felt emotionally drained by their work; 28 percent often or very often haven't had the energy to do things with their families or others; and 36 percent often or very often felt used up at the end of the workday.

"The bottom line is that employees today are trying to make it work, to restore the balance in their lives," says Ellen Galinsky, institute president and co-author of the report. "But what workers need, what would really make it all come together for them and their employers, is improvements in the quality of jobs and more support in the workplace."

But what if companies just offered workers an extra day off to ease the stress? Interestingly, one day wouldn't be enough according to a June 2000 survey conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide, an independent research company in Fullerton, California. The organization asked 1,038 Americans that very question. Its survey team gave respondents a choice: would they want more time, or more money Surprisingly, most surveyed employees said they'd take more money ($100) over an extra vacation day.