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I was no longer accruing vacation time as I hit the limit and my boss (who just delegated all his work to me and another employee) said there was no way I could take the 2 week vacation I had planned. So I quit/retired. I'd been planning it for a while but finally hit a wall. He's got a lot of work to do now 😊

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I agree with all this. One other idea I’ve had is letting employees take 2-3 hours out of a specific day and let them go out to lunch with their co workers somewhere and let them expense it. It gives employees time out of a day to relieve stress and blow off some steam. Also, I always felt that this is a better way to facilitate better working relationships with co workers than pointless Team Building meetings companies have.

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I don't know if it's me or the day and age we live in. I agree with Charlie's argument that Americans need a salve from being burned out at work. What I wouldn't give for time off. Yet midway through reading it, I turned into Eeyore and saw the downside of a summer slowdown.

To be an American at the intersection of being dependent on work income for survival, and any present or future categories of victim status claimants, is to be a participant in Allen Ginsberg's theorem. (He had a parody of the laws of thermodynamics in the vernacular 1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even; and 3. You can't get out of the game.)

1. Workers can't win because the forces of shareholders and institutional investors won't let workers win. If and when workers get this relief time, capitalists will gain concessions in the form of reduced wages, reduced headcount, or offload these time costs to the government in the form of public austerity.

2. Workers can't break even because people who will enjoy their time off end up making more work for the services sector. Time not spent working will be time spent shopping, dining out, traveling, or possibly even taking care of some deferred health issue. It seems like trickle-down economics in soft-colored packaging. The point of a summer slowdown is psychological compensation, not economic stimulus. Give this same psychological compensation to the services sector and you'd make customers miserable.

3. Workers can't get out of the game because an unhappy work life correlates with unhappiness with other facets of life. Working poors inhabit this grim reality of only being able to trade miseries. Giving a working poor person time off will make them acutely aware of their precarious economic plight. They might use the free time to find even more work, undermining the social goal of psychological compensation. Free time could also be punishment, as the home could have toxic family dynamics or loneliness, drug/alcohol abuse, or confinement because the worker lives in a high-crime neighborhood.

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I'm so late to this because I'm so bad at keeping up with good convos on social media, but I love this conversation and can't wait for your book. In the U.S., we need our vacation time and our health insurance to be tied not to our job status but to our existence as humans. That's my dream. Americans, all Americans get guaranteed PTO. That includes gig workers, retail workers and us freelancers. And I think a great guardrail would be something called a "right to disconnect" which I wrote about a couple months ago, which some unions like Prospect in the UK are doing great work promoting right now: https://www.damemagazine.com/2021/04/12/why-cant-american-workers-just-relax/

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Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuckoo, imo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo

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