It was a great year for labor -- if you worked at a call center in India, made your living as a CEO or sold real estate to big-box stores. But deep in Cubicle Nation, the average American worker remained on a fast track to the Industrial Revolution, with soaring workweeks, declining wages, and health, pension and vacation benefits vanishing faster than you can say job security.

Add to the siege outsourcing, cutbacks, the dismantling of ergonomics rules and forced overtime -- all while business is racking up historic profits, the most in 75 years -- and even a nearsighted dingo could see that the trends are unsustainable for families, personal health, company medical plans or an informed and involved citizenry. And completely unnecessary.

As all the productivity research shows, we can get the job done without finishing ourselves off. So let's fire some of the worst habits that got us here and ring in resolutions for a sane workplace in 2006:

Restore the 40-hour workweek. Almost 40 percent of us are working more than 50 hours a week, not exactly what the Fair Labor Standards Act intended when it set the 40-hour workweek in 1938. Chronic 11- and 12-hour days result in lousy productivity, expensive mistakes, burnout, triple the risk of heart attack and quadruple the risk of diabetes -- and leave families without a quorum for dinner. Two-thirds of people who work more than 40 hours a week report being highly stressed. Job stress costs American business more than $300 billion a year.

Establish rules for e-tools. The e-invasion is burying us alive. Human resources departments and individuals need to set tough-love boundaries that would determine message urgency, limit reflexive responses and establish no-send zones (i.e., no forwarding of multiforwarded emails and absolutely no work email at home or on vacation).

Give face time the pink slip. In the knowledge/digital age, it doesn't matter where your body is; what counts is inside your head. More telecommuting and flex schedules could save millions of dollars in office costs and hours reclaimed from gridlock, while providing workers much-needed flexibility, especially for time-crunched mothers.

Legalize vacations. Almost a third of American women and a quarter of men don't get vacation leave anymore because, unlike 96 other countries, the U.S. has no paid-leave law. Those who still get a vacation seldom get to take the whole thing. The average American vacation unit in the travel business is now a long weekend. It's barbaric. And myopic. Studies show that vacations improve performance on the job, not to mention cut the risk of heart disease and cure burnout. More than three-quarters of Americans say they would like to have another week off, which they'd get with the three-week minimum paid-leave law I've proposed.

Provide guaranteed sick leave. No one should have to lose a job because they get ill. But across this land, hardworking people are getting fired simply because their company offers no sick days and they got sick. It's time to join 139 other countries with a minimum sick-leave law and protect those who can't protect themselves. The Healthy Families Act by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, D-Conn., would provide seven days of guaranteed sick leave.

Make Lou Dobbs secretary of labor. The CNN anchorman's dogged coverage of outsourcing and the forgotten middle-class worker has single-handedly kept the plight of wage earners in the public eye. He's mad -- why aren't more of us? -- and he's not going to take it.

Support a living wage. With the skyrocketing costs of gas, food and rent, an increase in the minimum wage is long overdue. Consumers need to support companies that pay a living wage, such as Costco, and shun ones that don't.

Hold the back pats. This year, make a point of not supporting workaholic martyrs ("I worked all night! I came in on the weekend!" "Really? How lame.") who don't drive productivity but stress everyone around them.

Tighten the salary test. One of the main -- and unacknowledged -- drivers of overwork is the expanding definition of salaried employees. When the Fair Labor Standards Act codified the salary designation, it was intended to apply only to top administrators and managers, people who could hire and fire. Over the last two decades, the classification has been stretched to include more and more of us, particularly after new, elastic rules by the Bush administration that could turn everyone from chefs to preschool teachers into salaried workers. In addition, hundreds of thousands of hourly workers, from burger flippers to insurance adjusters, are misclassified as salaried. The explosion of salaried employees -- now 40 percent of all workers (including a huge jump in salaried caregivers) -- is without doubt having major repercussions on divorce rates, child care, civic responsibilities and drug sales. Wake up and smell the Paxil.

Provide paid childbirth leave to all working Americans. Family values start here. Only 40 percent of American workers are eligible for the 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act, and fewer still are brazen enough to actually take the time off. There are 163 countries that offer paid family leave. The sterling bunch that doesn't includes Papua New Guinea, Burkina Faso, Swaziland and the richest nation on the planet.

At a time when the people who make the products and services -- without whom there would be no economy -- are considered disposable, I'd like to see political candidates in '06 resolve to do a head count and tally the number of disaffected wage earners desperate for leadership. This group includes not merely the 8 percent of private-sector workers who belong to unions but a vast legion of American Dreamers, including 70-hour-a-week video game programmers, biotech engineers and retail-sales moms pressed to the gibbering edge. One Republican pollster has found that lack of time is the No. 1 issue for young working mothers, more of a concern than Iraq and health care.

American workers have done their part, doubling productivity since 1969. How about producing a workplace worthy of them in 2006?

"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.

Vacations are being downsized by the same forces that brought us soaring work weeks: labor cutbacks, a sense of false urgency created by tech tools, fear and guilt. Managers use the climate of job insecurity to stall, cancel and abbreviate paid leave, while piling on guilt. The message, overt or implied, is that it would be a burden on the company to take all your vacation days -- or any. Employees get the hint: One out of five employees say they feel guilty taking their vacation, reports Expedia's survey. A new poll of 700 companies by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance provider, found that 56 percent of workers would be postponing vacations until business improved.

The whole neurotic vacation system is based on guilt, on the notion that you are never worthy enough to take time off. The guilt works, because we are programmed to believe that only productivity and tasks have value in life, that free time is worthless, though it produces such trifles as family, friends, passions -- and actual living.

But before the work ethic was hijacked by the overwork ethic, there was a consensus in this country that work was a means, not an end, to more important goals. In 1910, President William Howard Taft proposed a two- to three-month vacation for American workers. In 1932, both the Democratic and Republican platforms called for shorter working hours, which averaged 49 a week in the 1920s. The Department of Labor issued a report in 1936 that found the lack of a national law on vacations shameful when 30 other nations had one, and recommended legislation.

But it never happened. This was the fork in the road where the U.S. and Europe, which then had a similar amount of vacation time, parted ways. Europe chose the route of legal, protected vacations, while we went the other -- no statutory protection and voluntary paid leave. Now, we are the only industrialized nation with no minimum paid-leave law. Europeans get four or five weeks by law and can get another couple of weeks by agreement with employers. The Japanese have two legal weeks, and even the Chinese get three. Our vacations are solely at the discretion of employers. The lack of legal standing is what makes vacations here feel so illegitimate -- and you so guilty when you try to take one.

The evidence shows that time off is not the enemy of productivity; to the contrary, it's the engine. U.S. companies that have implemented a three-week vacation policy have seen their profits and productivity soar. Profits have doubled at the H Group, a financial services firm in Salem, Ore., since an across-the-board three-week vacation became the rule nine years ago. They have risen 15 percent at Jancoa, a Cincinnati-based janitorial services firm with 468 employees that also went to a three-week policy a few years ago. The owners of both these companies told me they believe the switch in vacation policy is directly responsible for the improvement. Before the change, said the owner of Jancoa, the company had a high turnover rate and chronic overtime; after the new vacation policy went into effect, morale went sky-high, and so did productivity, which solved both the turnover and overtime problems.

This is not surprising -- rested workers perform better than zombies, as fatigue studies have demonstrated since the 1920s. One study showed that if you work seven 50-hour weeks in a row, you'll get no more done than if you worked seven 40-hour weeks in a row. Yet we have made work style -- how long, how torturously -- more important than how well we do the job, part of a destructive bravado contest to see who can have less of a life than the next person. My ulcer's bigger than yours.

I've heard so many poignant tales from the overworked-place, including that of a 35-year-old victim of a heart attack whose doctor attributed 100 percent of his ailment to unrelieved job stress, or that of a 50-year-old engineer who was downsized to a job that offered zero paid leave.

Overwork doesn't just cost employees. The tab paid by business for job stress is $150 billion a year, according to one study. Yet vacations can cure even the worst form of stress -- burnout -- by re-gathering crashed emotional resources, say researchers. It takes two weeks for this process to occur, however, which is why long weekends aren't vacations. An annual vacation can also cut the risk of heart attack by 30 percent in men and 50 percent in women.

Walter Perkins, a finance VP for a large American engineering firm, told me how he became a believer after running a Dutch firm acquired by his employer. He presided over six-week holidays for his staff and says he saw no loss of productivity.

"The Dutch work just as hard as their American counterparts," Perkins said, "but they have that knowledge that they're going to get that one month or more where they can really recharge the batteries. Guess what? Things don't come to a halt." The stats back him up. Contrary to myth, a number of European countries have caught the United States in productivity. In fact, Europe had a higher productivity growth rate in 14 of the 19 years between 1981 and 2000, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. The Australians, with their five-week vacations have also outperformed the U.S. in recent years.

I find it strange that the land of the free should be so deficient in vacation time, which is as free as you can get all year. In fact, the word vacation comes from the Latin root vacatio, which means "freedom." A vacation is our chance to get out there and discover, travel, savor and connect with family and friends, to put one over on the survival game. But fear is a specialist in strangling liberty. We're told that, with real vacations, companies would fall apart and that the U.S. economy would suddenly turn into Paraguay's.

This is why we need a minimum paid leave law that will put an end to the bait and switch of vacation time, as well as leave that's being yanked completely. Legalized paid leave would also end the loss of accrued vacation time from downsized workers in their thirties, forties and fifties, who have to start their paid leave banks over again, as if they were at their very first job. We can do better than having to prove we're worthy of vacation time until the day we retire.

I agree that time is money, just not in the way we think it is. Time itself is the real precious currency, because our supply of it is very limited. We need to pump our fists when we get vacation time, and not feel guilty.

This was brought home to me in a bizarre little church in the medieval city of Evora, Portugal, whose walls, columns and ceiling are plastered with the femurs, tibias and skulls of hundreds of 16th-century monks. The Chapel of Bones was designed by a creative sort to aid in the contemplation of mortality. I must admit it gave me a very good idea of where things are headed, particularly the parting words inscribed over the doorway: "We the bones already in here are just waiting for the arrival of yours."

Words to remember the next time someone wants to downsize your downtime into a long weekend.

Joe Robinson is author of "Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life" and founder of the Work to Live Campaign (www.worktolive.info), which is lobbying for a three-week minimum paid-leave law.