Should the U.S. have mandated vacation time?

Great Debates
1

50-hour work week? I’m fine with the way it is: Work more than 40 hours a week (or more than eight hours a day) and you’re compensated for it. Exempt employees generally are compensated at an hourly rate (not time-and-a-half) or comp time or more vacation time than non-exempt employees, or in other ways. So I think the system works.

But vacation time is another matter. I don’t know they numbers, but I think I’ve heard that a large percentage (25%?) of U.S. employees get no paid vacation. Many others receive one week a year, and two weeks’ vacation is considered ‘standard’. Where I used to work you got three weeks’ vacation after having been employed five years. Where I am now you have to work there ten years for the extra week. (I don’t use the two weeks I get every year, so more vacation wouldn’t do me much good. But it would be nice if it were available.) By contrast, it seems Australians get like 48 weeks of vacation a year. OK, I exaggerate. But the Australians I’ve met seem to have generous vacation time, and I’ve heard the same of Germans and French.

The U.S. is a moderately large country, and two weeks doesn’t seem quite enough. Two weeks for a Summer Holiday (sorry, couldn’t resist) is fine. A nice break with nice weather is a chance to recharge one’s energy. But the U.S. has a tradition of being ‘family-oriented’. Families are expected to spend time together for Thanksgiving especially, and for Christmas. Many families must travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get together. That takes time. A few days here and a few days there, and soon your ten annual vacation days are spent. Americans work more hours than workers in European countries. (NB: Old article, but I’ve heard similar, more recent reports.) People really do need downtime.

And yet some people don’t get any vacation time at all. Should there be a law mandating that employees receive a minimum amount of paid vacation (e.g., a week) each year? Should employees be entitled to receive the cash value of any unused vacation time if they quit/are laid off/are fired from their jobs?

Without vacation time, workers are deprived of their freedom to ‘pursue happiness’. Tired workers are not good workers. While the U.S. is the most productive country, European countries are closing the gap in spite of few numbers of hours worked. I suspect that Americans would be more productive if they had more time to recharge, not to mention that they’d be happier and possibly gain a broader outlook if they use their vacation time to travel, and thus possibly have a greater understanding of issues beyond their local area.

On the other hand, forcing businesses to pay workers who are not working would be a hardship for many of them. It’s all well and good to say you value your workers, but when it comes to paying for it… Many businesses balk at providing health insurance (there are a lot of uninsured workers out there) because of the expense. To add the expense of vacation time might drive some businesses under. And there’s the ‘freedom issue’. How can the government tell a business what it must do in a free society?

Someone’s freedom will be denied. Either the workers are not free to enjoy downtime, or businesses are not free to set their own policies based on their own situations. IMO (and this really is an IMHO post, but whenever I post there it always seems to end up here) businesses should provide at least one week’s vacation per year. IMO three weeks is not unreasonable. Should vacations be mandated by law? I’ll leave that question for debate.

2

I want to address this part of your OP first, because it comes up all the time. Why is it that people think employers need to provide health insurance for their workers? Do employers provide food, clothing, for their workers? Do they provide schools for the children of their workers?

We have the weird system in the US, a hold-over form WWII when salaries were frozen, where many employers provide health insurance since it’s tax deductible. But there is no a priori reason that health insurance, as opposed to anything else, should be provided directly by one’s employer. We have this thing called “money” that employers give to their workers, and then the workers go out and buy the things they need.

If we, as a society, decide that health insurance should be provided to everyone, then we, as a society, should pay for it.

As for vacation, I’m not really worked up one way or the other about it. If you mandate vacation, someone is going to pay for the vacations that aren’t already provided for, so it’s not like you can just legislate “free” time into existence. I guess I’d like to see exactly what the problem is before I brought the government (especially the federal government) in to “fix” it.

3

I’d sooner see vacation time stay like it is but go to a 4/10 workweek.

4

That’s really a debate for another thread, of which there are several. But to answer your question, I think that we, as a society, should provide health care to everyone, and that we, as a society, should pay for it. The reason people think employers should provide health insurance is because we, as a society, have not joined the 19th Century (c.f. Germany) or the 20th Century (c.f. every other industrial nation) and the only option for most people is private insurance. As to this thing called ‘money’, there are two problems: First, most people don’t have enough of it to purchase insurance without their employers’ subsidies. If we were all making $100/hour it wouldn’t be a problem. But for someone making $20,000/year there’s little enough to buy food and shelter. The other problem is that some people – even one or two on this board – cannot buy private insurance at any price.

But as I said, that is a debate for another thread. To bring this thread back on track:

A valid point, which I brought up in the OP; that someone has to pay for it – that ‘someone’ being businesses that might not be able to afford it. We already legislate ‘free’ time in the form of federal holidays. I don’t know the laws regarding federal holidays, but I’ve never worked at a place that didn’t either give employees paid time off for most of them, or else compensated employees with higher pay for working on them. (One exception I can think of is Columbus Day. Virtually no one gets PTO for that day, unless you work for some sort of government agency, including schools, or a bank.)

In any case, the ‘problem’ is that workers who don’t receive PTO are virtual ‘slaves’ to their employers. ‘Why don’t you just quit and get a job that does provide benefits?’ isn’t really valid in an economy where so many people are out of work.

You may wonder if I, personally, think that a minimum amount of vacation time should be mandated. I can’t answer that. I think people, not being machines, do need periods away from the job. But I also recognise that some employers can’t afford to pay for it.

On preview:

I have the option of working a 4/40 week, and I did work that schedule at a different employer. I worked it for a while with my current employer, but due to the length of my commute I decided to go back to 5/40. Four ten-hour days work for many people, but not for many others. I have other things going on in my life, and couldn’t do a 4/40 even by telecommuting (which I do at least twice a week). But I did like the schedule when it was feasible for me.

5

OK, but if you didn’t want to debate it, you shouldn’t have put it in your OP.

For federal employees we do, but no one is required to give everyone Independence Day off, for example.

Not trying to be snarky here, but you seem to be all over the map on what the laws are. Perhaps you should do some research about what the current situation is before posting an OP about the subject.

Ok, let’s stop right there. They are not “slaves” (appeal to emotion and/or statement contrary to fact) even if you put (the weasel word) “virtual” in front of that word. And if you’re proposing that there is a problem now because so many people are out of work, can we repeal your new law when the unemployment rate drops 5%, or are you just using that argument as a way of shoe-horning in a permanent change?

I think an employer would be extremely foolish to not offer his employees any vacation time, but I don’t want the federal government telling him he must. Unless the job is minimum wage, the employer will likely just reduce the worker’s pay by whatever the time off costs him.

6

It was a passing comment to illustrate that many businesses cannot afford voluntary benefits, let alone a mandate. You seem to have latched onto it. And I also said that my post is IMHO, rather than a debate. Specifically, I stated an opinion that other people may want to debate.

I said this is IMHO.

First, I did not say that there should be a mandate. I specifically said that I do not have an opinion on that. As for ‘slaves’, IANA lawyer. I do not feel the need to post a 15-page legal definition of anything. It’s shorthand, which you well know.

I agree that it is foolish for an employer not to offer vacation time. But there are a lot of ‘foolish’ employers out there. Or maybe not. Many people without vacation time can either accept the situation, or not have a job at all. Perhaps it would be foolish for their employers to pay them for time they are not working.

7

No, it’s not shorthand. It’s a common practice in GD to grossly exaggerate a situation in order to score rhetorical points. Workers are not slave, either real or virtual. And there are many people on this MB who will say they are, literally. Maybe you don’t post much in GD, but the use of the term “slave” to apply to workers is not automatically assumed to be “shorthand”.

8

At the job I’m working now, I was offered a choice. I could opt to have unpaid vacation and holidays at one hourly rate, or paid vacation and holidays at a lower hourly rate. When I added up the hours every year and multiplied by the two hourly rates, I chose unpaid holidays, because that way I made more money.

Paid holidays and vacation are just ways of forcing employees to save money for vacation. What matters is how many hours you work over the year and how much you make over the year. Paid vacation means you get a lower hourly wage. I’ll admit that paid vacation is very helpful for people who have trouble managing money, and since that is apparently most people paid vacations and holidays are a good idea.

9

I’m not so sure I’d call the US a family-oriented country, at least in relation to our competition. Sure our birthrate is higher than many countries, but there’s a lot of talk on the web how Brazilians, Italians, and especially Spanish tend to do lots more family activities together, especially extended family stuff. I think the Indians (the dot, not the feather) are famous for this too.

And of course, the US seems to have a really high divorce rate… but of course that could be because other countries do more shacking up outside of marriage, not sure.

Of course, what you’re missing here is that workers are always free to enjoy downtime - all they need to do is quit their job and take another one that offers more vacation. Or go into business for themselves, and they can define their schedules as they wish. Or go into a profession that provides a lot of freedom along those lines; sales come to mind.

At the macro level, people get as much vacation as they deserve, economically speaking. If they are complete studs then they can negotiate for more. If not, well, then they really don’t merit the extra time off.

10

I want the government out of my life as much as possible. Do you really want the government telling you what to do even more than they do now?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Who do you think is going to pay for this? And aren’t we getting our asses kicked by foreign competition enough? Do you really want to find a way to make the American worker even more expensive?

11

You talking about the foreign competition in Europe that has lots of vacation time and days off? Or are you talking about China where workers get 80 cents an hour? Germany has a solid industrial base . Ours is disintegrating.

12

I’m not sure if you are whooshing us or not. Workers in the United States get less vacation time than almost any country in the world.

13

No Whoosh. We can give all workers an extra two or three weeks of vacation time if you want. But someone has to pay for that. And my guess would be the cost of American goods will go up. What will that mean to our ability to compete, and keep what little manufacturing base we do have?

14

Most European countries work less hours and have more benefits and vacation time. Their industrial base is not suffering like ours. But their corporations did not offshore like ours did either.
Your logic would suggest, that in order to compete, we should have no vacation time. Just cannot put that burden on the poor little corporations.
We have cut our wages in half . Now we will get lots and lots of jobs. Only it did not happen. Third world countries pay wages that we can not live on.

15

“My logic” says that there is a benefit package that American workers currently get and there is a benefit package that all other workers commonly get. And within this construct, (and many, many others) the world economy runs. I’m guessing that European workers get more benefits than American workers in some areas, and less than in others. So comparing just one of these areas (vacation) to the exclusion of all others doesn’t make sense.

If this law were passed, and on average every American worker received an extra 10 days of vacation for example, how would that effect the current American system? Someone, somehow must pay for the added two weeks of lost production. So my guess would be that we’d have to hire more workers to do produce the same amount of widgets, and thus, the price of those widgets would go up. And seeing as we have competition problems in the world market as it, this would only exacerbate that. I’d love to be proven wrong.

On the larger point, I think the government has its hands on my live too much as it is. And I don’t welcome that growing.

16

It’s not just a matter of “merit”, but employees really do need to take vacation. In some cases, companies try to force their employees to take more.

You might think of vacation in terms of a reward, but employees do need time off to recover. It’s often in the economic best interests of a company to force them to do so. It’s a basic assumption that a company will always make the economically rational decision, but what about the case when the economically rational decision is to pay an employee not to work for a period of time? It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to envision some corporate number cruncher trying to shore up the short term bottom line by doing away with that.

This speaks exactly to the “lost productivity” argument. You lose productivity when your employees are angry, tired, and burned out. I’m not saying you should give everybody 2 months off, but you get that “lost” productivity back (at least for non-manual labor jobs) by having rested, relaxed employees. Even for people working a line, you potentially reduce workplace accidents just from having rested employees.

And it’s precisely the situation my company is in. We’re trying to get people to take more vacation but they seem driven to keep working. It’s likely to cause some decrease in efficiency, but it still happens. It’s getting better though, with more emphasis taken by HR on sending a work/life balance message.

17

No it isn’t. Our manufacturing sector is larger than ever.

We’ve gone over this many times. Domestic manufacturing JOBS are shrinking, but manufacturing itself is growing. Our manufacturing sector is about twice as large as China’s. Yes, it’s not growing at over 5-10% like China, it’s only growing at an anemic 1% or 2%. But growth at 1% is not disintegration. If our manufacturing sector was disintegrating it would be shrinking in size, which is not what is happening.

Also, please don’t play the “Oh, so you believe the lying official numbers?” card. Because if you do, I’ll have to ask why you believe the lying official numbers from China or Germany, but not the lying official numbers from the United States.

18

How about if instead of using “your logic” you try and figure out what the facts are. Compared to Europe, Americans have a pretty crappy set of benefits. Everyone in Europe has some sort of healthcare coverage. Depending on the country they get more vacation days, have family leave (men and women), get long notice of layoffs, receive re-training, have shorter work weeks, and other benefits. Yet somehow the Germans still seem to have a robust manufacturing sector. Maybe it’s because they have such an excellent system of vocational education.

Where America surpasses other countries is in executive compensation. Perhaps that is why we are not competitive.

19

Ok, first of all, is this about vacation or paid vacation? Those are two different things.

For paid vacation, there should be some regulation of how paid vacations are handled, as an example, employees should accrue vacation time that must be paid for or provided when paid vacation is a stated benefit. But should it be required for employers to provide paid vacation? Well, it depends on the next part.

Unpaid vacation is a different thing. That is about providing employees time off from their regular schedule. It can be an undue hardship on people who can never get a weekday off. How are you to register a car or close a mortgage on a house without a weekday off from work? There are many other reasons people need time off from work for legimate social and economic reasons. So there must be some reasonable means of allowing people time off from work without their jobs being jeopardized.

So now paid vacation just becomes an accounting trick. If each employee is allowed a certain number of days off per year, that simply means their daily pay has increased by that number of days divided by the days they actually work.

So yes vacation time must be mandated. But payment shouldn’t be.

20

How about you read what I wrote first, and then decide if you need to insult it? I didn’t put a value judgment on the benefits that American worker get. If you can show where I did please do so.

Some workers get really great benefits, and some get really crappy ones. From your attitude, I’ll hazard a guess and say you’re in the latter group.

What I said was, that this will have a cost. And the cost may well be jobs lost to those willing to do the job for less. If “we” think that’s worth it, fine. But I think the ‘we’ should be you, your fellow workers and your employer, not Washington.

I fear this is another pie in the sky thread implying that “we should all have solid gold driveways and date supermodels,” without thinking how this is magically going to appear. Because it isn’t. There will be a price.