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lx-post - vacations
From Notes from the Road: http://www.notesfromtheroad.com/greatbasin/coalpits_wash_01.html
The American workforce works in a ghostly robotic way. We obsess over multitasking and email, oversharing and contributing to these habits of continual connectedness. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a friend who told me to end my relationship with email. If you want to get something done, he said, pick up the phone.
Americans feel they have to justify even a little but of time off. I 'm helping family, but just email or call or set up a video conference if you need something.
Companies also expect their American employees to stay connected even while on vacation. And the emails never stop. If an American employee stops managing his emails for a few days, he will often worry about the onslaught of emails building up. If he just manages those emails, his return to the office will be more sane.
Nurses who work in elder care facilities and with middle-aged adults have been seeing unsettling trends: American adults are beginning to have those same listless, disconnected traits that previously, nurses only identified in nursing home patients.
As justification for the American work habit, I have heard that "the United States is the big leagues, if you want to make it big, you come to the U.S., but if you want to have vacation and hang out, you can go to Europe.
But the comparison is false, because as the United States has adopted a no-vacation work ethic, It's productivity and economy have declined relative to first-world countries who offer adequate vacation. The United States' prosperity index has been plummeting in comparison to other first-world countries where vacation time is standard.
But even among those who do plan vacation, About 20 percent end up having to delay or cancel their plans because either they or their partner's work obligations forces them to stay behind.
As our work culture forces us deeper and deeper into this weird, robotic work mentality, the health of our workforce deteriotes. Just in the past twenty years, since about the year 1990, the obesity rate in the United States has ballooned.
American billionaire Warren Buffett has explained that the U.S. companies health care expenses puts them at a gross disadvantage against other companies. Comparing the U.S. to most of the rest of the world, the United States spends about seventeen percent of GDP on health care, while most of the rest of the world spends only nine percent.
Also, info links:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speed-up-american-workers-long-hours
http://www.grist.org/living/2011-06-28-the-medium-chill
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