Take time off? Americans prefer to work

Workaholism. The Puritan ethic. Feeling guilty about taking earned days. The fear of being overrun by competition. People frequently cite these reasons for junking their vacation days.

Others, often at the worker-bee level, save vacation days for family emergencies or appointments that crop up. "If the cable guy is going to come by the house, a lot of people have to take a vacation to be there, for instance," says John Schmitt, coauthor of the "No-Vacation Nation" study. Or, says Bernard N. Katz, of the employment law firm Meranze & Katz in Center City, "people will try to save vacation days for supplemental sick leave, for when they can't work."

And clearly, a number of people who fail to take their time off really like their work. After cramming in more than a week of unused vacation time at the last minute, Christiana Brenner, a senior account executive with a Chicago firm, ended 2007 with 11 unused vacation days. Brenner, 26, who grew up in Tuckerton, N.J., about a 90-minute drive from Center City, says she's "fortunate to have a job I truly enjoy" and even considers fun.

Last year, Cassandra Oryl didn't give up any of her 10 vacation days and three holidays, but the year before, she traveled for fun to Portugal, and still left days behind at Braithwaite Communications, a Rittenhouse Square public relations firm. "Because we're an agency, we ultimately have to answer to clients," she says. "So some years, there just isn't much time for vacation."

No time for vacation - it's a running American theme despite much research that trumpets the restorative benefits of time off. These include the well-respected Framingham Heart Study, which found over two decades that workers who take annual vacations are less likely to die of heart attacks.

"The whole workplace is worse off than we probably know," says Joe Robinson, founder of the Work to Live Campaign, seeking a minimum number of government-mandated paid vacation days in the United States. Robinson also works with Take Back Your Time, another group stumping for legislation. "People are preoccupied with defining their identities by their jobs," he says. "All the economic and job issues just exacerbate it."

Robinson, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., and takes all his vacation, offers an antidote: the Cook Islands, sun-drenched in the South Pacific. He took time off there. "No stress," he says. "In the middle of nowhere. I highly recommend it."