Labor Day is a paradox – a holiday about work. What we should be doing today is not rushing to the beach but celebrating the history of the American Trade Union movement with parades and speeches. Labor Day is the one day in the year when we are supposed to celebrate work. Work has a very special status in America. Most of those lazy foreigners consider work to be a curse and a nuisance. But here it is considered a good and even a noble thing. If the statistics are to be believed, which perhaps they should not be, Americans work harder than any other nation on earth.
Europeans are astonished that Americans take so little vacation time. No law guarantees a single paid day off, and the average worker gets a tiny 8 days of paid vacation after a year on the job and 19 days after three years—if they’re lucky. One out of ten companies offers no paid vacation at all, and in some states, it’s as low as one out of five.
How did American vacations get so short? The Germans enjoy thirty days of paid leisure time yearly, and the lucky French have five weeks. The Italians have six weeks. What’s more, Europeans actually take their vacations. They leave work, leave town, and don’t return until the last minute. And the last possible minute is now. In France, September first signals La Rentrée (literally the return) in a national chaos of traffic jams and airport delays, as millions of students go back to school, and parents reluctantly return to work from their own long summer breaks.
One explanation of American work habits is that we love our work so much that we can’t bear to be away from it. The statistics on job satisfaction do not bear this out. Another traditional answer, proposed by the sociologist Max Weber in 1904, is that America inherited a “Protestant work ethic.” Hard work is pleasing to God, and idleness is next to sin – a belief that Benjamin Franklin incarnated back in the eighteenth century. France, of course, is a historically catholic nation and has no protestant ethic. So, French workers constantly campaign in favor of more idleness, longer vacations, and earlier retirements, to the despair of the government that must pay for it all.
President William Howard Taft, who liked to take it easy himself, proposed in 1910 that all American workers should be entitled to a two-to-three-month vacation. In 1939, the Department of Labor also recommended mandatory paid vacations for everybody. It never happened, and in fact, vacations have been getting shorter and shorter since 1945.
It’s not surprising that American workers are tired. Everyone needs a decent break each summer, and it must be a paid break so that everyone can afford it. President Taft had the right idea. But three months might be too much to ask. Vacations are stressful in themselves, as well as being horribly expensive. A month would be about right, enough time for true relaxation without the slightest taint of sinful idleness. If we had just finished a whole month of vacation, it would be a positive pleasure – and perhaps even a relief - to return to work tomorrow.
