Summer holidays

Wrote about holidays a few weeks back, and in particular some grim statistics from the US. So this piece here in the IT which reiterates much of that is of some interest.

But I had to wonder about the following:

We are more Berlin than Boston in our approach to longer holidays. EU countries take an average of 34 paid days holidays a year, compared with 25 in the US. Americans have become even more holidayphobic. The always-working culture has never been stronger. This year a study found that four out of 10 Americans do not take an average of eight days of their already limited holiday time, effectively leaving a million years of untaken leave on the tables of US employers every year.

And supporting quotes push agency back onto workers in all this…

“We can train ourselves to getting used to any length of holidays,” Farren says. “Americans can convince themselves that two weeks per year is enough, and teachers convince themselves that three months is too little.”

The problem is that this is not a ‘culture’ – that of longer or shorter or no holidays – that falls from the sky, as it were, or is ingrained in workers, but is something that is structured openly or not by employers and which workers must adhere to. Indeed the statistics in the piece linked to originally from here above is open about that. 55 million Americans don’t get paid vacation. Not that they don’t want it or don’t take it but don’t get it. And in a ‘culture’ like that it is more than obvious how that plays out across those employments where there is paid vacation.