As summer in the Northern Hemisphere officially gets underway (the solstice is today at 22:34 UTC), Robert J. Samuelson at The Washington Post asks, “Are you a ‘work martyr’?” That, he writes, is the travel industry’s term for employees who don’t use all their vacation days.
Research by a travel industry initiative called Project: Time Off found that since about 2000, the average days of vacation taken by a full-time American employee has fallen from more than 20 days to 16.2 days in 2015—leaving a total of 658 million vacation days unused. The travel industry estimates that would-be vacationers could use that time to spend $223 billion on travel, creating 1.6 million jobs. (Results are based on a survey conducted between January 20 and February 16, 2016.)
Samuelson at the Post suggests that people might be forgoing vacation because of the uncertain state of the U.S. labor market. However, he notes, the trend is not reversing as the labor market improves.
Project: Time Off cites several reasons employees have left vacation time on the table, including fear of returning to a mountain of work (37% of survey respondents) and the belief that no one else can do the job (30%).
Samuelson also comments on connectivity, which blurs the boundaries between work and the rest of life. He quotes Katie Denis, author of the Project: Time Off study, as calling the office “omnipresent.”
That might make it seem easier to take vacations; workers can always tune in to the office from anywhere if necessary. But perhaps people are unwilling to spend money to go somewhere if they expect they’ll just end up sitting in a hotel room replying to email.
Perhaps this paragraph from Samuelson best sums it up: “We Americans have a confused and contradictory relationship with vacation. In theory, we love it; in practice, we often dread it. So much expectation is heaped on a few weeks of free time that disappointment, if not inevitable, is common. Worse, our escape from the job and daily routine fills us with anxiety that, somehow, this interlude will inflict a gruesome revenge once we return to work.”
