Vanishing Vacations: Blaming the Victims

A few years ago in one of my intro public speaking courses, a student got up in front of the class to talk about the issue of vacation time. He started off the speech by showing the audience a chart that compared the average amount of vacation time enjoyed by the British, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, and Americans. The Americans were dead last, as I recall, far behind the next closest (which I think were the British).

After that intro, I thought he was going to try and persuade us to become part of some movement to get justice for American workers--at the very least I thought he would ask us to write a letter to our congressman or something. Instead, and I'm not making this up, he said: "since you probably won't have more than a few days of vacation, you should spend that time in Boca Raton." The rest of the speech showed us pictures of beautiful Boca.

That student like so many American workers seemed to have internalized the idea that you just can't do anything about bad treatment anymore. In a recent essay, writer Mark Ames takes aim at the American worker for participating in his own demise. He writes:

. . . America's workers - are such willing collaborators in their own existential demise. According to a New York Times article, British workers get more than 50% more paid holiday per year than Americans, while the French and Italians get almost twice what the Americans get. The average American's response is neither admiration nor envy, but rather a kind of sick pride in their own wretchedness, combined with righteous contempt for their European worker counterparts, whom most Americans see as morally degenerate precisely because they have more leisure time, more job security, health benefits and other advantages.

It's like a classic case of East Bloc lumpen-spite: middle Americans would rather see the European system collapse than become beneficiaries themselves. If there is one favourite recurring propaganda fable Americans love to read about Europeans, it's the one about how Europe is decaying and its social system is on the verge of imploding; we Americans pray for that day to come, with even more fervour than we pray for the End of Days, because the very existence of these pampered workers makes us look like the suckers and slaves we really are. This is why you won't see Bono or Sir Bob Geldof rallying the bleeding-hearts anytime soon on behalf of America's workers. They're not in the least bit sympathetic. Better to stick with well-behaved victims like starving Africans.