Why don't Americans enjoy greater vacation time?

Why don’t Americans enjoy greater vacation time?

0 Comments | Sunday News; Lancaster, Pa., Sep 4, 2005

At hundreds of thousands of summer homes scattered across the country, at rustic lodges, motel playgrounds and campsites, the scene is always the same: a charcoal fire smoking away on a blackened barbecue grill, and on it, swordfish or steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs. It’s a magical time. The family gathers to enjoy a meal cooked outdoors; the talk is about trivial matters; and the world stands still.

Earlier there were lazy hours spent reading the newest Harry Potter book or staring at the lake, disconnecting yourself from the business pressures that normally bedevil your life. Yet these are the times of which Americans possess less than the population of any other advanced industrial nation. Some of us sprinkle throughout the year carefully allocated segments of a paltry two or three weeks of vacation. Many Europeans enjoy as many as seven. I have a nephew who lives in France with his wife and two children. Every year, he books the entire month of August in a rotating choice of inexpensive resorts in Greece or the Greek Islands, Bulgaria or Croatia. For that entire month, he and his family turn off the world. They live, on their vacation, in far more modest surroundings than in their Parisian apartment
fire magic grills