After this Labour Day weekend, I’m starting to believe that employers need to rethink the whole paid vacation thing.
Not, like, revoking it or anything like that. The labour movement fought long and hard to earn rights for workers. Before there were labour laws, employers were free to work their employees as long as they wanted — all day, every day, and no holidays.
Now, workers are legally entitled to paid vacation days in most countries, except for a few backwater nations such as Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and the United States.
Vacation days are great but recent observations have me feeling that we aren’t using them correctly. Several friends just got back from vacation and we’ve been comparing notes — and it doesn’t sound like any of us had a very relaxing time.
I listened to these stories having recently returned from a summer vacation in which my family, including two children under five, visited so many of our Prairie friends and family that, by the end of the trip, we’d covered a distance greater than 10% of the Earth’s circumference.
It’s a distance that would have taken us a few kilometres past Toronto, which is an interesting comparison because, by the end of all the driving, I would have been perfectly happy to plow the car into Lake Ontario.
My friends and I are all back at work now and none have the healthy glow one should have coming off vacation. More precisely, we have the sweaty glow one gets after eating a full rack of ribs and drinking two bottles of red wine every day for three straight weeks.
That’s all good, though — that’s what vacations are for. The problems arose when we returned to work and were expected to get back to work. Right away. And not just work but work harder than normal to cover for other people on vacation and to get ourselves back on track while also going through the 400 vitally important email messages accrued while we were gone.
It’s not realistic for employers to expect an instant return to peak performance. Can’t you see we’ve got the shakes because we haven’t gone to a greasy roadside diner for at least 24 hours? I mean we’ve literally got the shakes, as in milkshakes are squirting out of our pores. Mmm, chocolate.
So here’s what we need: A vacation from vacation days. It could be just a little time to relax and ease back into things following our stressful holidays. Maybe it could be spending that first day back in a quiet room with comfy couches and a discreet bartender, a place where we wouldn’t feel any shame in the fact that we were only gone for three weeks but have completely forgotten how to log on to our computers. Or maybe a half-day trip to an internet-friendly spa where they’ll scrape the sunburn off our necks and remove those last few Doritos from our hair while we take our time responding to the few emails piled up in our inboxes that aren’t penis-enlargement related.
That would be a healthy way to end a vacation and re-enter the working world. I suppose you could argue that it’s not an employer’s responsibility to fix the poor choices employees make on their own time, but that’s not the proactive, visionary thinking that got us to where we are now.
Come on, stand behind the workers who make this country great.
What do we want? Massages! When do we want them? Now!
—Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News.
[email protected], @Sports_Andy
