Do Americans Work Too Much?

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“The gap between Europe and America seems to be growing,” says a baffled Orvar Löfgren, a professor at Lund University in Sweden and author of an excellent history of vacations, On Holiday (University of California, 1999). “I’m a bit amazed at this, because Americans love having fun.”

So where did we go wrong?

Americans started out on a level playing field with Europeans, with a week to two weeks in the ‘30s, when paid vacations were first introduced, says Löfgren. But “there was a decision made at some stage: Do you want more pay or longer vacations? The unions in Europe went for longer vacations. The state in many European countries was very much concerned that vacations were good for you, that everyone should have holidays, that there should be legislation about vacation time. I don’t think the state played the same role in the United States.”

After that the Europeans shot ahead of us, adding a week more vacation in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. As a result, Swedes get five weeks off by law, plus another two weeks during the Christmas holidays. And don’t forget the paid public holidays, he reminds me, which are far more frequent around the world.

Meanwhile, we are spending more time on the job than in past decades. The husband and wife in a typical U.S. household are now working 500 more hours a year than they did in 1980, according to Eileen Appelbaum, research director at the Economic Policy Institute. Absenteeism due to job stress has tripled in the past five years. So has the number of people calling in sick who aren’t, a phenomenon called “entitlement mentality”: Workers are using sick time to take the days off they feel they deserve.

Clearly, we have hit the wall. If we have no time for family and friends, no time to enjoy, explore, refresh, and recreate, no time to think that there could be, should be something more, what exactly do we have?

One tired nation. Estimates are that about half of all U.S. workers suffer from symptoms of burnout. Pam Ammondson, author of Clarity Quest (Fireside, 1999), sees the wreckage in her Santa Rosa, California-based Clarity Quest workshops, designed to help people suffering from burnout reclaim their lives: “I see a lot of people who work 12 to 14 hours a day routinely,” she says. “They want to make a change, but they’re too tired to know how to do it. Overwhelmed is a word they use a lot. . . . We allow downtime for machinery for maintenance and repair, but we don’t allow it for the employees.”

The health implications of sleep-deprived motorists weaving their way to the office or operating machinery on the job are self-evident. One study conducted by the American Psychosomatic Society found that men age 35 to 57 who took annual vacations were 21 percent less likely to die young than nonvacationers and 32 percent less likely to die of coronary heart disease.

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