Vacation Starvation

"How do Americans do it?" asked the stunned Australian. He had zinc oxide and a twisted-up look of absolute bafflement on his face, as we spoke on a remote Fijian shore. I'd seen that expression before, on German, Swiss and British travelers. It was the kind of amazement that might greet someone who had survived six months at sea in a rowboat.

The feat he was referring to is how Americans manage to live with the stingiest vacations in the industrialized world -- 8.1 days after a year on the job, 10.2 days after three years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Aussie, who took every minute of his five weeks off each year -- four of them guaranteed by law -- just couldn't fathom a ration of only one or two weeks of freedom a year. "I'd have to check myself into the loony bin," he declared.

Well, welcome to the cuckoo's nest, mate, otherwise known as the United States. In this country, vacations are not only microscopic; they're also shrinking faster than revenues on a corporate restatement. A survey by Internet travel company Expedia.com has found that Americans will be taking 10 percent less vacation time this year -- too much work to get away, said respondents. This continues a trend that has seen the standard U.S. vacation, as measured by the travel industry, buzzsawed down to a long weekend.

Some 13 percent of companies now provide no paid leave, up from 5 percent five years ago, according to the Alexandria-based Society for Human Resource Management. In Washington state, a whopping 17 percent of workers get no paid leave. Vacations are going the way of real bakeries and drive-in theaters, fast becoming a quaint remnant of those pre-downsized days when we didn't have to keep the CEO in art collections and mansions. The result is unrelieved stress, burnout, absenteeism, rising medical costs, diminished productivity, and the extinguishing of time for life and family.

Caught in a vise-grip of spiraling work hours and shrinking vacations, employees across the country hardly have a chance to catch their breath or enjoy the fruits of their labor. These are people like Nancy Jones, a nurse in Southern California, who last year put in a vacation request in January to attend her son's wedding in July. "They kept giving me the runaround," she recalled. "They tell you they don't know if you can have the time, because they expect to be busy. It happens all the time." After her manager ignored numerous requests, she wound up having to corner the director of the company, just days before the wedding, to get the time off.

An aerospace worker from Seattle sent me an e-mail that sums up the growing dilemma of vacations that are only on paper: "If you try to take a couple of your vacation days, you get told no, so your only recourse is to call in sick, and probably not get paid for it, and risk getting management mad and becoming a potential candidate for termination. What happened to families and the reason we go to work to begin with?"

In the early '90s, Juliet Schor first called attention to skyrocketing work weeks and declining free time in her book, "The Overworked American." In the decade since that groundbreaking work appeared, things not only haven't gotten any better -- they've grown worse. We're now logging more hours on the job than we have since the 1920s. Almost 40 percent of us work more than 50 hours a week. And just last month, before members of the House of Representatives took off on their month-plus vacations, they decided to pile more overtime on working Americans by approving the White House's scrapping of 60 years of labor law with a wholesale rewrite of wage and hour regulations, turning anyone who holds a "position of responsibility" into a salaried employee who can be required to work unlimited overtime for no extra pay.