As this first summer of the new millennium approaches, I can’t help but wax nostalgic about my two years as a professor in the Netherlands. There, as a civil servant on a twelve month schedule, I was entitled to about nine weeks of paid vacation. It seemed that few professors took all that time, but three to four weeks was virtually obligatory. Late spring was the time of year the lunchroom conversation turned to holiday destinations, perhaps because this was when the vacation allocation arrived in the paycheck-a fat 8% bonus added to one’s salary. It was the government’s way of making sure every Dutch worker had money to take a proper holiday. Of course, it wasn’t really a bonus, but an intelligent “forced savings” program in which a bit of one’s pay was held aside each month.

Back in the USA, vacation practices seem downright archaic. Unlike most of Western Europe, where paid vacations are typically four to six weeks for all regular workers, the US has no official vacation policy. Employers are not required to provide them, and the starting norm in good jobs remains a paltry two weeks. Millions of the hard-working poor, without steady employment, have no paid vacation at all. And millions of the hard-working well-to-do have nice allotments which exist only on paper-the excessive demands of their positions make planning and taking significant time off almost impossible. Furthermore, Americans are much more likely to keep working while they do go away. (I’ll never forget that long afternoon in the Hamptons during the B.C. (before cellular) era-when the stock broker and I nearly came to blows over the only pay phone at the motel...)

The failure to increase vacation time in the US is especially scandalous these days, given how much harder most Americans are working. According to the National Survey of the Changing Workforce, US employees in 1997 were working 3.5 more hours a week than they did twenty years earlier. They are working more hours than they are scheduled to work, they do more overtime, bring more work home, and take more business trips. And sixty percent still report that they don’t have enough time at work to finish “everything that needs to get done.” This, despite the fact that 68% report having to work “very fast” and 88% reporting having to work “very hard.” American corporations seem downright ungracious about vacations when viewed in this light. Or when we consider that they give their European employees the same month to six weeks that European companies do.

The Western Europeans have come to understand that being a good hard- working employee requires an annual period of serious relaxation. Not just a three day jet to the Bahamas, but a genuine unwinding, not only from work, but also from the hectic pace of daily consumer life. In the U.S., we tend to use vacations as opportunities for consuming, whether it’s expensive hotel stays, outlet shopping, or exotic luxury destinations. This is part of our larger pattern of work and spend, using economic progress to consume more, rather than give ourselves more time off. By contrast, Europeans treat their vacations less as spending sprees. They’re more likely to go camping, or hiking, or stay in the country, where they can live more simply, enjoy the pleasures of nature, and reflect on their daily lives. The vacation bonus ensures that everyone can afford to do this, even the lowest paid service workers. In Western Europe, vacations have become a basic human right. in the us, they feel more like an endangered species.

Almost ten years ago I wrote a book called The Overworked American. Now, my personal sure-fire signal that summer is approaching is the flurry of calls I get from reporters assigned to the annual hand-wringing piece about how and why Americans don’t have enough time off. This year I decided to write my own. Let’s hope it’s a short-lived tradition.

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Juliet Schor is a member of the board of the Center for a New American Dream and author, most recently, of Do Americans Shop Too Much? (Beacon Press). She teaches at Harvard University. This article is distributed courtesy the Center for a New American Dream’s Syndicated Column Service. For more information about the Center, click on www.newdream.org, or call 1-877-68-DREAM.