How much vacation do you get per yr? According to this article, hard working americans get 8 days off.
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, most of all, 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. In a new poll of 700 companies by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance provider, 56 percent of workers would be postponing vacations until business improved.
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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43409-2003Jul24.html?nav=hptoc_lol
I'm self employed, so i get as much time off as i want. I also don't get unemployment payments or any other benefits if i don't work. I guess there is a good side and a downside. Does your company give you enough time off? Is the article leftist?
SS