On this Labour Day weekend I’m starting to think 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. Workers on the way to the factories and mines would see rich folks driving to vacation destinations in their fancy motorcars with their children in the back spilling old-timey grape juice on the seats, all the while screaming, “forsooth, are we there yet?”
The workers, naturally, believed that they too should have the right to once a year wander around some strange city trying to read a map while wearing a Tilley hat. And so they united, risking their jobs and sometimes even their lives to earn more rights, including vacation days.
Now workers are legally entitled to paid vacation days in most countries around the world except for a few backwater nations such as Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and the United States of America.
Vacation days are great, but recent observations have me feeling that we aren’t using them correctly. Several of my friends just got back from vacation and we’ve been comparing notes. It doesn’t sound like any of us had a very relaxing time.
One mother took her family on a camping trip to a hot destination — literally hot, because the campground was basically inside a forest fire. On one booze run into the nearest town she felt an eerie calmness as she walked into the near-deserted liquor store. It was only later that she learned the town had been evacuated.
I was listening to these stories having recently returned from my own summer vacation in which my family, including two children under the age of five, visited so many of our lovely Prairie friends and family that by the end of the trip we’d covered a total distance greater than 10 per cent of the earth’s circumference.
It’s a distance that would have taken us a few kilometres past Toronto if we’d kept going, 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 of us have the healthy glow one should have coming off a battery-recharging vacation. We more accurately 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, you know, get back to work. Like, 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.
Messages like the several hundred from concerned spammers who were worried about our ability to “please our lovers the way they want to be pleased.” Aw, thanks for caring, guys.
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: vacation from vacation days. It could be just a little time to relax and ease back into things following our hard-working, stressful vacations. Maybe it could be spending that first day back in a nice 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 that make this country great.
What do we want? Massage! When do we want it? Now! Or maybe just after a hard vacation? Or … oh all right, I’ll book my own damn massage. But I’m sending you the bill.
Happy Labour Day!
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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