America’s legacy?
I think Americans underestimate the value of a few days off. Maybe it isn’t that we underestimate their value, maybe it is because most of us are afforded so few days off from work that we covet them and protect them and hoard them for the perfect time. We hang onto them like little life rafts of sanity and much like the Titanic, there are sadly too few of those life rafts to go around.
My company recently revised our vacation policy to require a zero balance as of December 31st of each year. We are no longer allowed to accrue vacation time and therefore everyone in the office is scrambling to use up their years of accrued vacation time. It is affecting our operations because we’re so short staffed that important tasks aren’t being completed in a timely manner, like oh, billing.
Now, I rarely write about my work, even though it is supposed to take up the majority of my life because I really try to separate my work life from my home life. Given the nature of my job it is very difficult to do this. You see, I work wherever my phone is. Sales has a way of bleeding into your private life. You never really shut down. I shut down by not answering or carrying my phone.
Today is my first day back from a four-day weekend. Though I carried my phone with me, I didn’t answer it all weekend. I took a true 4 days off from work, from life, from everything. It was the BF’s (Formerly LTT) birthday and we sort of unplugged. Spent most of the weekend curled up on the couch, in bed, running errands, watching rented movies and trying our hands at cooking new and exciting things. (Exciting because we had no idea how they’d turn out). It was a really nice weekend.
It got me to thinking though. Why do Americans get so little time off? Why are we, as workers, so quick to give up our benefits under pressure from management? Why are we, as a nation, so anti-union? Most industrial countries in the world have much better worker protections than the US does. Most industrial countries have more personal time off than American workers do.
I’ve been raised to believe that America is the best country in the world, but the older I get, the less that seems true. We’re at the bottom of most of the world’s best lists. Our education system is broken, our infrastructure is antiquated, the entire health care system is over-priced and doesn’t work for those that most need it, and yet we fight each other to keep things the way they are???
What is wrong with socializing certain aspects of our society? We already have socialized police, fire and transportation. We have a form of socialized medicine (Medicare) that most people in healthcare will admit runs better than private insurance.
I doubt this country will be able to pull itself out of this death spiral until we do what the founding fathers intended and limit the power of businesses. Look at the problems faced by this country, where the money comes from that is fighting to keep the status quo? Unless we seriously limit the powers of the corporations paying off congress and the Senate, America is sure to continue to drop on the world’s “best of” charts… oh, except maybe where to get the cheapest workforce, which is truly what most corporations want anyway. Cheap labor and profits.
Nice legacy America.
Screw it. Let’s expatriate to Germany!