Working Holiday

What's wrong with this picture?   The cartoon was featured as part of a recent article in Work/Life Today,which bills itself as "the newsletter for work/life professionals".

In my version of this cartoon instead of the man in the flowered swimming trunks there would be a mom in an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini on the surfboard with laptop, cellphone(wireless ear piece-natch), rubbing SPF 40 suntan lotion on a  small child while giving them a Ziploc bag full of cheerios.

Am I missing anything? Perhaps the pet dog is on the back of the surfboard too.

The article was in response to Expedia's sixth annual survey on the vacation habits of work prone Americans. According to the survey, which was released shortly before the 4th, Americans are forfeiting 574 million vacation days. When you realize that Americans have the smallest amount of vacation to begin with,(France has over 30 days a year)the reality of those four days left in the office is magnified. As Nina at Queercents wrote in her post on the issue....

Jo Bronson at Time recently penned a commentary about Americans and their inability to relax. He believes that we have begun to prefer brief snippets of what he calls “stolen time” to the long stretches of authorized vacation. He notes, “According to travel agents, the growth trend in travel is the half-week sneak-away built around a weekend. Families still hit Disneyland and Paris, but we cram the experience into three or four days. We don’t get to relax, but we come away feeling as if we got a bargain for our precious time. Fewer workdays off means less catching up.” Why are so many Americans not taking their vacations? He concludes, “One of the top reasons given for not taking a vacation is that it’s too much extra work. We have to get ahead of our workload in order to leave, and then we have to catch up on our workload upon our return. The longer the vacation we take, the bigger the stumbling blocks appear. So only 14% of Americans will take a vacation two weeks or longer this summer. Bottom line: it’s simply become too stressful to relax.”

The technical term for this growing trend is Vacation Deprivation. According to the folks at Word Spy:

"vacation deprivation n. Foregoing vacation days because of busyness at work.
—vacation deprived adj.

In addition to providing citations of how the term is being used, Word Spy also lists the earliest citation it could find. Turns out that honor goes to The Dallas Morning News on October 29, 1995.

While many of us fret over the vacation days we leave at the office, Tula Connell who blogs for the AFL-CIO puts the entire vacation deprivation issue into perspective

The survey cites 14 days as average for an American worker, a number that doesn’t include federal holidays. But citing 14 days as an “average” figure also minimizes the extent to which millions of workers get no paid vacation, even while working two or more jobs.

In fact, 25.5 million private-sector workers in the United States do not have paid holidays and 22.2 million private-sector workers have no paid vacation, according to a survey of benefits by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Work at Avis car rental? No paid vacation. Tend to our elderly in many of the nation’s nonunion nursing homes? No paid vacation.

In this corporate mind-set economy, where workers are getting further behind even as they work longer hours, musing about the “vacation gap” may seem like fretting over not having a garden when you can’t even afford a house."