Draconian vacation policies for US slave workers
in [Europe]
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From: Sarah Banick on 11 Aug 2006 12:04 Interesting article on the value of vacation. I've marked a few paragraphs (with ****) that explain the value of longer vacations. http://alternet.org/story/16611/ Vacation Starvation 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. By Joe Robinson, AlterNet. Posted August 18, 2003. "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
From: barney2 on 11 Aug 2006 12:05 In article <v99pd253k7q1t32nsnpsev7d3rls3rq0m5(a)4ax.com>, me(a)privacy.net (Martin) wrote: > *From:* Martin <me(a)privacy.net> > *Date:* Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:42:49 +0200 > > On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:40:06 GMT, mrtravel <mrtravel(a)bcglobal.net> > wrote: > > >Sarah Banick wrote: > >> > >> Do you have actual numbers on this? I am really curious to see if > > that is >true. There are many Americans who have never been out of > > their state or >region, especially those at the lower end of the > > socioeconomic ladder. Their >typical trip is to the nearest beach or > > amusement park. > > > >Do you think the people in the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder > in >OTHER countries spend a lot of time traveling? > > Of course. Have you never heard of European football hooligans. They're not necessarily on "the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder"...
From: JohnT on 11 Aug 2006 12:10 "Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:ht9pd2959okb32ouvg1o6jsjhjtgahflp7(a)4ax.com... > Hatunen writes: > >> In civil matters "proof" is not a criterion. > > In all matters depriving persons of property or liberty, due process > is a necessary prerequisite, according to the Constitution. The FRENCH Constitution? JohnT
From: barney2 on 11 Aug 2006 12:10 In article <6qapd2pd2eh79e6cjhc78f4hh9t30kq3dr(a)4ax.com>, me(a)privacy.net (Martin) wrote: > *From:* Martin <me(a)privacy.net> > *Date:* Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:09:21 +0200 > > On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:05:55 -0500, barney2(a)cix.compulink.co.uk wrote: > > >In article <v99pd253k7q1t32nsnpsev7d3rls3rq0m5(a)4ax.com>, > me(a)privacy.net >(Martin) wrote: > > > >> *From:* Martin <me(a)privacy.net> > >> *Date:* Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:42:49 +0200 > >> > >> On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:40:06 GMT, mrtravel <mrtravel(a)bcglobal.net> > >> wrote: > >> > >> >Sarah Banick wrote: > >> >> > >> >> Do you have actual numbers on this? I am really curious to see if > >> > that is >true. There are many Americans who have never been out of > >> > their state or >region, especially those at the lower end of the > >> > socioeconomic ladder. Their >typical trip is to the nearest beach > > > or >amusement park. > >> > > >> >Do you think the people in the lower end of the socioeconomic > > ladder >in >OTHER countries spend a lot of time traveling? > >> > >> Of course. Have you never heard of European football hooligans. > > > >They're not necessarily on "the lower end of the socioeconomic > ladder"... > > I didn't say all of them were. <mixi>I didn't say all of them weren't.</mixi>
From: Sarah Banick on 11 Aug 2006 12:20
"mrtravel" <mrtravel(a)bcglobal.net> wrote in message news:qx1Dg.5683$o27.3607(a)newssvr21.news.prodigy.com... > Sarah Banick wrote: >> >> Do you have actual numbers on this? I am really curious to see if that is >> true. There are many Americans who have never been out of their state or >> region, especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. >> Their typical trip is to the nearest beach or amusement park. > > Do you think the people in the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder in > OTHER countries spend a lot of time traveling? No, but this is the comment I was responding to: "Your question is nonsensical. The fact that Europe is Balkanized means that a trip in Europe that is "abroad" and requires a passport would be a domestic trip in the US. Instead try asking how many people in the US travel away from home and how far the typical trip is and compare with Europe. You'll find that Americans travel more. A trip from Amsterdam to Brussels means, what, a 2 hour train ride? And you can call it "travelling abroad" while a trip from California to New York by train takes several days and is equivalent to and Ireland to Greece trip.)" |