What You Need Is More Vacation!

By Steve Lopez/Santa Monica

Congratulations, ace. America's unprecedented economic gains were beaten out of your work-obsessed hide, and what have you got to show for it? A few extra bucks to pay the shrink or the barkeep? A promotion that bumps you up to 60 hours a week? A pager? The bone they haven't thrown you is the one you desperately need--more time away from the salt mine.

According to a raft of recent studies, Americans are working more and enjoying it less. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of people calling in sick because of stress more than tripled. "I've got a lot of clients coming to me from Silicon Valley," says Pam Ammondson, 45, who runs Clarity Quest, a Santa Rosa, Calif., workshop to counsel jangled burnout victims. "It's a dream to make a million dollars overnight. But these people are not happy, their relationships are miserable, and they're taking a step back to ask what it's all about."

Frankly, if they're making a million overnight, how much sympathy can the rest of us have? One man, however, is working overtime on our behalf for the time off we're being cheated out of. Joe Robinson, 49, of Santa Monica, Calif., an adventure-travel magazine editor, has been on talk shows nationwide pitching a law that would guarantee three weeks of vacation to anyone who works at a job for a year and four weeks after three years. On his website Escapemag.com Robinson rants, "We're the most vacation-starved country in the industrialized world." A self-serving campaign? Yes, but it's gathered 20,000 petitioners for longer vacations. "Small-business employees get an average of eight days off, while Europeans and Australians receive four to six weeks' paid leave," says Robinson. "In total hours, we now work two months longer each year than the Germans."

John Schmitt of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, puts the average American vacation at 16 days. If not for their higher unemployment rate, the Europeans would be laughing at us. Anyone who travels has noticed that whether you go to Palm Springs or Timbuktu, the French and Italians are already there. You could parachute onto an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean and find 200 Germans lounging around talking about where to go next.

The European economy may be a bit sluggish, but just how productive, really, is the U.S. approach? "Half of all Americans report some kind of stress, and 63% say they'd rather have more time off than more money," says Robinson. "We have no identity outside of work, and there's this new glorification of the tech guy who works 18 hours a day. The issue is: How does a corporation reward the people responsible for this economic boom? It's all going to the CEOs through stock options and executive-vacation packages."

Barry Miller, who as a teacher and career counselor at Pace University in New York City studies the cost to corporate productivity of broken families, says some employers are beginning to consider "work-life balance." Translation: it has dawned on them that working you to death may hurt their profits. "It costs us 150% of an annual salary to replace an employee in terms of retraining a new person, the turbulence it causes in a unit and the impact on our client," says Denny Marcel, associate director of the burnout-prevention unit at Ernst & Young. Miller calls the accounting firm, which offers three to five vacation weeks to its 20,000-plus employees, one of the better companies when it comes to lightening the load.

Robinson knows we'll see chimps back in orbit before we see a federal mandate for vacation time. But he hopes a debate on the bottom-line realities of burnout will inspire a rash of enlightened self-interest among employers. So before you see how far you can get this summer on your short vacation leash, take a trip to Escapemag.com and sign a petition. Provence, Tuscany, the Greek isles--your employer owes you nothing less. Workers of the world, unite!