Death of the American Vacation

In a growing and disturbing trend in American business, more and more Americans have stopped taking time off to vacation. Unlike Europe, where the average citizen is granted an average of six weeks vacation, often with pay, American workers are often denied paid time off. And in some jobs, employees are not permitted vacation time at all. Currently in the United States, there is no law that requires American companies to grant employees vacations or vacation pay.

According to several surveys, including one conducted in 2005 by RoperASW and another by the online travel web site expedia.com, nearly 30% of adults are skipping vacations altogether. The reasons cited are lack of vacation pay, financial constraints, overwhelming work loads, and a fear that if they leave for a few weeks their jobs might not be there when they get back. Fear of lost wages and unemployment is especially true in lower paying jobs, service jobs, and those jobs typically characterized as "blue collar."

With a strained economy that has led many employers to reduce their number of employees to only a skeleton crew, many employees feel that taking time off for a vacation would leave their employers and fellow employees in a bind. Many Americans also feel that they cannot afford a vacation; especially with the current economic recession, families are seeing one spouse unemployed or seeing a reduced number of hours with their current job. Another side of the recession is that many Americans are not being promoted or given raises, creating even more financial constraints.

This shrinking of the American vacation is also the shrinking of America’s connection with the rest of the world. While Europeans are free to travel for weeks on end and to explore distant places and diverse cultures, Americans have steadily become more disconnected from the rest of the world, incapable of seeing and interacting with other world views. This lost time to travel and explore other cultures has a detrimental effect on American education and places us at risk of not only isolation from the outside world, but also a failure to understand how people in the rest of the world think. The long term consequences of American isolation not only impact how we see ourselves, but also the policies we enact both domestically and abroad. Too often, these policies reflect a genuine distrust and lack of understanding of our world neighbors both near and far.