Do Americans Get Enough Vacation?

It's become sort of a hot topic, tangentially discussed in Moore's Sicko, and explored at length in the liberal blogosphere. Good Klein has made it a sort of mini-mission to steer policy towards guaranteeing workers some vacation time (he correctly notes that America is the only advanced country in the world without some level of federally-mandated vacation time). Matthew Yglesias has gone on record saying that this will have an adverse effect on economic growth and productivity, and will most likely suppress wages. That's the standard economic argument from theory, and I've seen no convincing evidence to contradict it.

So here comes "Kathy G.," guest-blogging while Klein is on, ahem, vacation. She's got two posts on the topic. The first cites a study that shows that Americans' leisure time has increased since the 1960s. Obviously, leisure time isn't the same as vacation time, but it supports the notion that if given the choice between higher wages -- which creates opportunities for more leisure time in short bursts through outsourcing of domestic tasks -- and lower wages but more long-form vacation time, Americans tend to prefer the former. She cites all the reasons why the study is methodologically sound (large samples across time, controls for demographic changes, the use of time diaries instead of surveys, etc.), but then says that she simply doesn't believe it, and cites a few reasons why (the best: people who agree to do time diaries aren't random observations and present a bias of self-selection).

Another important part of the study shows that higher-wage Americans have less leisure than lower-wage Americans. This would seem to indicate that, when given the option to work more (and make more money) or to work less (and accept lower wages but more leisure time), Americans overwhelmingly choose to work more.

But in her next post on the topic, she does a curious thing: she contradicts the above assertion by saying that we don't know if people would trade wages for more vacation time because we haven't asked them. This is strange because she acknowledged the troubles of using survey data in the previous post. Also, because the example she gives of people not being asked seems to contradict her premise. She cites Arlie Hochschild's Time Blind, a book which tells the story of a company which offered a generous time-off policy. But the employees, motivated by the opportunity to advance (and thus make more money) if they worked more and took less time off, chose to forego available vacation time. This seems like a pretty straightforward example of Americans being given a choice: more money, or more vacation. In this case they chose the extra cash. (Kathy G. implies that employees worked more because their fellow employees worked more. I have no doubt that this is true, but nobody said there wasn't a trade-off involved. Indeed, that's sort of the whole point.)

I haven't seen a broad study on the topic, but my intuition is that a similar story could be told about many companies. But instead of focusing on this point, Ms. G. comes to a strange conclusion: employees need union-lite workers' advocacy groups to (apparently) poll workers and (apparently) use that data -- which presumably would show that workers would prefer vacation time to extra money -- to influence national labor policy. Right.

But unfortunately, according to Ms. G., neither employers, unions, or any moderate political platforms are interested in this. So we need to overhaul the government by electing a progressive Democratic president (presumably Edwards), a larger Democratic majority in the House, and a Democratic Senate with more than 60 votes. This will enable us to crack the influence of unions and create new workers' advocacy groups to pressure employers for more vacation time for workers.

Despite the fact that there is no, y'know, evidence that this is something that workers actually even want, and some pretty strong evidence to the contrary. Yeesh.

It's a weird couple of posts.