Vacation-deprived Americans still a happy lot

 

 

 

It’s August again. That means that while the French buff their tans along the Mediterranean, Swedes feast on crayfish in the Baltic archipelago and Germans shed their clothes on Ibiza, it’s business as usual for America’s hamburger-flipping, minimum-waged, vacation-deprived drones. Two weeks out of 52, while the Europeans measure their legally mandated vacation time in months. Is there no justice?

 

Mercifully, the actual contrasts are not quite as stark. The number of public holidays in

the U.S. falls at the center of the west European spectrum. In terms of the number of hours actually worked annually, the U.S. ranks only a smidgen above the O.E.C.D. average (2008 figures) and in any case below the Islanders, the Israelis, the Italians, the Greeks, not to mention most Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and the drones of the world, the South Koreans.

 

Americans may work longer at the job, but the corollary is they also work less at home. The contrast is most notable for women. Figures from time diary studies in the 1990s reveal that European women worked almost 10 hours more doing housework than their American counterparts, who spent most of that time in formal work. American families relied instead on paid labor and services to accomplish the domestic tasks that wives still perform in Europe. Add formal and domestic work together, and the differences in total work are much less stark than usually presented.

 

Working less spread over the year is not, of course, the same psychologically as working hard and then getting a break, though there is also evidence that vacations can be as stressful as they are pleasurable. But if we look at other measures of well-being, we do not find the correlation we might expect between the vacation-deprived Americans and their overall state of being. In surveys they complain less of workplace stress than most Europeans.

 

Fewer are disabled than anywhere in Europe outside of Italy. Americans are happier than all Europeans except the surprisingly sunny Scandinavians. They commit suicide less often than all Europeans outside the Mediterranean and the U.K. So, perhaps vacations are not all they are cracked up to be.

 

And, of course, you have to have a job to take vacations. Before the recent crisis raised U.S. unemployment, one of the advantages of the labor market flexibility that spared American employers the burden of long paid vacations was that they also hired more than their European counterparts.

 

But even today, those excluded from the labor market, and therefore not enjoying its perks, are harder hit in Europe. Youth unemployment in the U.S. is about twice the overall jobless rate, but in some of the most vacation-prone E.U. nations, like France, it is thrice, and in Norway and Sweden, it is four times as high. The unemployed 20-year-old Italian who lives at home, expecting his mother to cook and clean for him, is not expressing his preference for leisure, but is suffering from a labor market that, having heaped benefits on his father, now serves him ill.

 

And let us not forget the new measure of the social value of everything: carbon footprints. Americans tend parsimoniously to take a local camping trip during their short vacations, while the Germans fly off to Phuket or Goa thrice a year and the British jet monthly to their holiday houses on the Costa del Sol. Vacations are a major source of global warming. While Americans may be ecological slobs in their transportation habits, as vacationers, they are setting an example for the world.