Europe goes to vacation homes, America goes to work

According to a report published by the European Trade Union Institute this summer the Europeans will easy get their share of the vacation but their American colleagues will find it difficult to enjoy summer while going to work.

Finland and France give their employees a six week statutory vacation. On the other hand United States is the only country where employees get no statutory vacations. According to the report, compiled by the Washington-based Centre for Economic Policy Research.

"The United States is in a class of its own," the report says. "It is the no-vacation nation."

According to Andrew Watt, an economist at the Brussels-based European Trade Union Institute, the report showed errors that many economists make when saying U.S. productivity and economic output is better than Europe's. According to Japanese and Canadian law, the employees are given at least 10 days paid leaves by their employers. European s get at least 4 weeks by law and often much more in practice.

Comparatively speaking, Americans are winning the time-clock Olympics. The typical U.S. worker puts in 1,804 hours at work each year, 135 hours more than the typical British worker, 240 hours (or six full-time weeks) more than the average French worker, and 370 hours (or nine full-time weeks) more than the typical German. The Conference Board's magazine points out that the trend toward increased work demands "has begun to reverse the two-century-old industrial paradigm of equating progress with increased leisure." None of this is good for our family relations. Middle-class couples in the United States, taking both spouses together, are working 520 hours (13 full-time weeks) more a year than such couples worked in the 1980s. Little wonder that the Families and Work Institute found in 2004 that 67 percent of working parents say they don't have enough time with their children, and 62 percent say they don't have enough time with their spouses.

According to a study of 173 nations worldwide, the United States is one of just four that does not provide paid maternity leave. The others are Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea. That's not the usual company we keep. (In Britain, women receive 39 weeks paid maternity leave.)

United States is the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee its workers any paid vacation at all—which explains why, amazing as it may sound, one in four workers in the private sector doesn't receive any. In the 27 nations of the European Union, by contrast, workers are guaranteed at least four weeks off. (In France, most receive six weeks.) The United States is also the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee paid sick days to its workers, and as a result, nearly 60 million workers—43 percent of middle-class workers and 77 percent of low-wage workers—don't get any, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. (The Family and Medical Leave Act allows for 12 unpaid weeks off if an employee—of a company with 50 or more workers—is sick or has to care for a spouse, child, or parent.)