With Independence Day falling on a Wednesday this year, many parents with jobs outside the home, took off Thursday and Friday to extend the holiday weekend. Others simply exercised a week’s worth of vacation to spend uninterrupted holiday time with their families.
Are you enjoying time away from the office right now?
If so, consider yourself lucky.
According to a new study, the United States is one of only a handful of developed countries in the world that doesn’t require companies to give their workers time off. In other cases, workers are given minimum vacation time that cannot be transferred from year to year. In other words, if you don’t use up your allotted vacation time in a calendar year, you use lose it.
Compare that with workers in places like the United Kingdom and Germany. The former are guaranteed at least five weeks of paid vacation while the latter is guaranteed a month of paid time off to spend with their family.
The Atlantic recently published a piece that revealed a startling statistic on America’s minimum paid vacation laws: “Around the country, nine in ten full-time workers get paid leave from their employers averaging 12 days.” However, according to a 2011 Harris Interactive study, a whopping 57% of working Americans don’t use all of their vacation time.
How ironic.
While most American workers are given peanuts in terms of time off compared to other countries, many don’t even bother to use all of it.
And then there’s the faction of workers who exercise vacation time, but end up spending at least part of their family trips checking emails, taking calls from the office and sending in reports via their smartphones. Unplugging from work is becoming nearly impossible these days and children are the ones paying for it.
Think about it; when was the last time you took time off from work and completely detached from office culture? In most cases, parents may be physically present with their kids at the beach, amusement park or national landmark, but mentally they are running numbers, formulating schedules and worrying about unanswered emails.
Once upon a time, most vacation destinations didn’t feature WiFi. What’s more, smartphones and other electronic gadgets, which allow us to keep in touch with the office, were merely an idea in some other worker’s mind.
If you took vacation time this week, do your kids a favor and turn off your iPhone or laptop, take some cleansing breaths, and have fun. Summer is short, and if you don’t unplug and spend quality time with your children now, you could miss some of the best times of their lives.
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