Why did I even bother reading this piece?
"[W]ith each passing year, more Americans view something that used to be an entitlement—paid time off—as an increasingly unaffordable or unavailable luxury."
I remember when I used to accrue vacation hours. Then they stopped doing that -- those meanies! No, wait [checks pay stub], the hours still accrue.
"Many Americans are struggling to cope with job creep—the phenomenon of work quietly grabbing more and more of our leisure time. We are forever receiving co-worker or client messages on our BlackBerrys, or responding to work e-mails on our home computers on weekends, or lugging our laptops on vacation."
...because if we don't, we'll be fired?
"In the pre-air-conditioning era, many factories closed down in August. No longer."
See now, August is slave labor month at aforementioned factories. And even worse, the assembly line workers themselves have to receive co-worker and client messages on THEIR BlackBerrys!
"A common complaint is that it's not worth going on vacation for more than two or three days because, with work piling up and hundreds of e-mails waiting to be opened, it is so maddeningly difficult to catch up after returning."
An almost as common complaint is that people have become pathologically incapable of delegating, or of covering for each other.
"[T]he proportion of Americans who said they would take a vacation over the next six months has fallen to a 30-year low of just 39 percent."
Just two out of five?! [a single tear falls down my eye]
"Jeffrey Immelt, GE's chief executive, has boasted of working 100 hours a week for more than two decades. That translates to working six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. One software engineer I wrote about at Electronic Arts, a video game company, had to work 179 out of 180 days during one stretch in 2004, usually for 13 hours a day."
They're quite typical, you see.
"Many economists view job creep and disappearing downtime as important contributors to the surge in employee productivity in recent years—a blessing for corporate America and its bottom line. But workers are paying for this, in the currency of higher blood pressure and stress levels."
Ah, "corporate America," that faceless monolith of evil. Why, I ran into Corporate America on the street the other day. He (it?) cackled with glee at my misfortune, and at the sheer injustice of all the things in life that benefit Corporate America and only Corporate America.
By which I really mean mutual funds, index funds, pension funds, and individual shareholders. But I'm sure some of them are no less evil.
"In researching my book, I was surprised to learn that the United States is the only industrial nation that doesn't guarantee its workers any paid vacation at all."
This is the line that inspired the title of the post -- assuming you take it at face value rather than as a slimy rhetorical trope. You're writing a BOOK ABOUT ECONOMIC TRENDS and you're SURPRISED to learn that America's work place laws are significantly less paternal than the rest of the world? Feh.
Oh, while we're here, a lefty(?) blog rant excerpt quoted without comment:
Envy is simply not good economics. It has never led anywhere except to trouble.
I'll start things off: How about the French Revolution?
Back to Mr. Greenhouse... or not. Lines like "The presidential candidates may not be able to [...] halt globalization and the way it erodes job security for factory workers and white-collar workers alike" should be in pull-quotes so that you get a distant early warning of where these people are coming from and how clearly they're capable of thinking, much less writing.
Posted by Matt Bruce at June 13, 2008 06:06 PM