You Must Be Very Busy

By Michael Kinsley

It wasn't enough, was it? Millions of Americans are coming to the end of their annual summer vacations. You've enjoyed a couple of weeks off from work * -- maybe three if you're very lucky. You're right to want more. The American chintziness about vacations is absurd.

In Washington, at least, the easiest way to flatter someone is to say, "You must be very busy." (And the most disconcerting answer is, "No, not really.") It is today's ritualistic form of obeisance. It means, "You must be very important." We've come a long way in the century since Thorstein Veblen wrote about "conspicuous" or even "honorific leisure" as a way of displaying social status. "Gosh, you must have nothing at all to do all day," would not be considered a compliment.

The equation of busy-ness with importance may help to explain Americans' queasiness about vacations. The Washington Post reports that two days before Iraq invaded Kuwait, when troops were already massed on the border, someone tried to reach the head of Kuwait's civil defense, only to be told he was on vacation for the next three weeks. Go ahead and laugh. But is that any more absurd than Dan Rather, who was on vacation in France, spending the day of the invasion desperately scouring the Middle East for a place to broadcast from and ultimately settling for London -- rather than permitting a war to occur while he was off-duty?

Last year I worked for a spell at the Economist in London. The attitude there was a revelation. They take pride in their work, and can be as self- important about it as any group of American journalists. But they also take five weeks of vacation every year, plus nearly a week at Easter and nearly two weeks at Christmas when the office is shut, plus the usual holidays. And it would take more than a mere war somewhere to get an Economist editor to cancel his or her summer "hol."

American vacations compare poorly with those of most other advanced countries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American full-time worker puts in a 40-hour week, gets 11 official holidays and 12 days -- slightly more than two weeks -- of paid vacation. That's typically after five years on the job. Among major industrial countries, only the U.S. doles out vacation time primarily as a reward for seniority rather than as a basic job benefit.

The British on average work 39 hours a week, get eight paid holidays and enjoy 25 days -- five weeks -- of paid vacation a year. The French by law work a standard week of 39 hours, have eight holidays and get 25.5 days of annual vacation. The Germans -- the Germans! -- work a 38-hour week, get 10 holidays ! and have 30 days, six weeks, of paid vacation.

Yes, yes, you say. But what about Japan? As they reluctantly phase out Saturday work, the Japanese are down to an average of 42 hours a week. They are entitled to an average of 16 days of paid vacation, but characteristically use only nine of them, though the government is urging them to use more. However, the Japanese get another 20 days off a year that are labeled holidays, only 11 of which are national celebrations. The others are, in effect, vacation days bunched at high summer and year's end. In short, although many Japanese still work on Saturday, the typical Japanese worker gets more actual vacation time than the typical American. While the Japanese move toward more days off, the U.S. is moving toward fewer. The BLS finds, unsurprisingly, that vacation policies tend to be more generous in unionized companies and in manufacturing, both of which are declining.

As they become more affluent, individuals and societies face the same choice. They can enjoy the increased value of their labor in the form of more goods and services, or they can enjoy it in the form of less work. It is humbling, for an American, to note that the war-wrecked societies of Europe and Japan have made their remarkable comeback while devoting an ever greater share of their productivity to "buying" themselves time off. The standard- of-living statistics, which still usually show the U.S. ahead, do not include the value of an extra two or three weeks of leisure every year.

Of course the notion of a trade-off between productivity and leisure assumes that if people work 50 weeks a year, their output is greater than if they work 46 or 47. For the prototypical assembly-line job, that might be true. But fewer and fewer jobs are like that. For most "brainworker" jobs, there isn't such a clear relation between time put in and what comes out. (Any writer can tell you that.) At some point, the relationship reverses itself. That old businessman's saw, "I can do a year's work in 11 months but not in 12," contains a lot of truth. But who admits, these days, to taking a month off?

At the upper reaches of the American economy, where official vacation time is more generous anyway, there is a lot of "work" that would look like vacations to most people: entertaining clients at golf tournaments, boards of directors meetings at luxury hotels, conventions in Hawaii, conferences of the Trilateral Commission, and so on. Dispensing with a couple of weeks' worth of these frivolities would do the American economy no harm.

Time off is not always a function of affluence. Sometimes it takes the unwanted form of unemployment. If we are heading into a recession, it would be more sensible as well as more compassionate for employees to share the reduced available work and increased available leisure, rather than imposing more leisure than anyone wants on an unfortunate few.

One of the most admirable things about Ronald Reagan as President was his freedom from time snobbery. There was a man who didn't worry that his importance was measured by the number of hours or days he spent at his desk. George Bush seems to have inherited the same healthy attitude. (He does suffer from a related preppy affectation of taking leisure activities such as games and sports terribly seriously.) Let the nation learn from its leaders.