Kate Zernike
The vanishing American vacation
Sat Aug 30 14:40:27 2003
67.1.130.179

http://www.iht.com/articles/108157.html
The vanishing American vacation
Kate Zernike/NYT Friday, August 29, 2003

In Los Angeles, a hotelkeeper yearned for Yellowstone. In Indianapolis, a dental hygienist dreamed of Walt Disney World with the kids. The Washington public relations person pictured Las Vegas, and in Moorhead, Minnesota, the farm equipment factory worker fantasized about lounging on a beach - though she would have settled for a week off to clear her closets.
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Yet all they were likely to soak up was the ambient anxiety of offices beset by a bad economy.
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With Labor Day coming Monday in the United States, surveys and anecdotal evidence show this to have been the vacationless summer - indeed, the vacationless year - for thousands of Americans.
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They are caught in the consequences of a recovery that has yet to seem real. With employers not filling positions left open by layoffs, many people say they are doing the jobs of two or three workers. They have had no time to plan a vacation, much less take one.
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Workers who have found jobs after being laid off say they now fear coming back from vacation and discovering those jobs gone. People have lost bonuses and raises and have even taken pay cuts. Some employers no longer offer vacations, or have made them harder to earn.
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According to a survey of 700 companies by ComPsych, a Chicago provider of employee assistance programs, 56 percent of employees said they were postponing a vacation until their work situation improved.
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The remaining 44 percent said they were scaling back on time off - a day here or there to go to a wedding, say, instead of a week to get away.
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A survey in May by the online travel agency Expedia.com found that 12 percent of respondents were taking no vacation, 10 percent were taking less vacation than they did last year, and 20 percent said they felt guilty taking vacation.
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Over all, the survey found, employees were giving back $21 billion in unused vacation days this year.
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"Because I'm more of a project manager, sometimes I get worried that if I go away, they'll just go straight to the staff that's doing the job, and then think, 'Well, what purpose does he really serve?'" said Matthew Arts, who lost his job with one public relations firm in Washington in October and now oversees multimedia projects for another. "It's probably self-induced paranoia, but just because it's happened before I'm scared to leave for a long period of time - say, a week."
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Julie McCormack took a contract position with a large farm equipment company in Minnesota four years ago after being laid off from a similar company. Her contract did not include vacation days, but the first two years, her boss gave her a week off each year anyway - time she used to travel to Scotland and Italy.
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"Little by little our perks eroded away," said McCormack, 45. "There's no room in the department fund for a day off or anything."
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The plant closes for two weeks each summer and winter, but she took a temporary job because she needed a paycheck. "It was kind of nice because it was something different," she said, "but it's not a vacation. I didn't get to go anyplace new and exciting, I didn't get to buy souvenirs, I didn't get to not have a schedule."
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People are starting to push back. The Work to Live Campaign is lobbying Congress and the platform committees of both national parties for a mandatory three-week vacation law. A coalition of groups has organized Take Back Your Time Day on Oct. 24, a date chosen because it is 350 work hours before the end of the year, roughly the number of extra hours Americans work each year compared with western Europeans.
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Modeling it on Earth Day, organizers say they hope the event will get people thinking about the toxic effects of too much work.
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"Some people say with this bad economy, isn't it a bad time to be going out asking for more vacation time," said Joe Robinson, the author of "Work to Live" and the founder of the campaign. "But it turns out to be the opposite, because yes, there's 6.2 percent unemployment, but there's 93.8 percent working unprecedented hours and not getting any relief from time off. There's a real sense of injustice.
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"We're supposed to be a nation of fair play; we're a nation of no play."