For more than six years, 32-year-old Arron Pierre has worked as a controller for a Plaquemine land management company. With three small children, a wife who teaches full-time and a demanding job he loves, his life is busy.
And every year, he loses vacation days that he never takes.
“We have a use it or lose it policy,” Pierre, one of four managers with A. Wilbert’s Sons LLC, tells Business Report in a feature from the current issue. “If you don’t use it, you don’t get to bank any or roll it over, but I don’t use it at all. I barely use any of it.”
He isn’t alone.
Americans are steadily earning more vacation days but they’re using fewer than ever before, leaving 222 million vacation days unused or forfeited last year under companies’ “use it or lose it” policies, according to a new study by Washington, D.C.-based Project: Time Off. The online study surveyed 5,641 American workers, ages 18 and older, between Jan. 20 and Feb. 16. Of those workers, 21% of them were managers.
The study revealed that between 1976 and 2000, Americans took an average of 20.3 days of vacation per year, but last year, they only used 16.2 days, nearly a full week less than 30 years ago.
This unused vacation epidemic has negatively impacted the economy, the study says, resulting in a $223 billion loss in total spending, 1.6 million jobs lost and $65 billion in lost income. While 95% of Americans said that using their paid time off was important to them, 55% left vacation time on the table.
“The problem is that when you move up in your career, especially in middle management and executive levels, you have so much you have to do all the time, you don’t feel like you can take a vacation day,” says Daniel Whitman, assistant professor of management for LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business. “And even if you can, you won’t really take one because your job is on your mind all the time and you don’t feel like you can fully get away from it.”
And then there’s technology. Around-the-clock internet access, along with digital technology, now hinders workers from every fully disconnecting from their jobs.
“Jobs have become more flexible since the internet has begun to own us,” says Whitman. “Email is accessible nearly all the time. There are really only three days per year that people don’t get email—New Year’s, Christmas and Thanksgiving. The rest of the time, they are writing and answering emails.”
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