Stop Donating Your Vacation Days to Your Boss

Stop Donating Your Vacation Days to Your Boss

<!-- speaker-eval: pass verdict=ok confidence=high recommendation=none auto_swapped=false -->

Kathryn: Welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

Robin: And I'm editor Robin Rauzi.

Kathryn: On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.

Robin: The problem we're talking about this week is that Americans are apparently bad at taking vacation. So we're going to ask, is that us, or is it actually the economy?

Kathryn: It's the economy. Don't worry. You're all beautiful and special and brilliant, and it's the economy to blame. But before we do that, we have some announcements. OK, first, the biggest one. We are going to take a break on production of the podcast for about a month.

Robin: Kathryn has to go write a book.

Kathryn: I have to write a book.

Robin: She's got a deadline.

Kathryn: I've got a book. I've got a deadline. I've got to do it. Turns out it's hard. Turns out doing a podcast is hard. We're just going to take a little summer break. We're going to take our own vacation and model good vacation behavior for all the optimists by working through vacation. Do what Robin's doing. Everybody be Robin and just take real time off.

Robin: Just go to yoga.

Kathryn: We also want to shout out some really great reviews, including LyleStyle24, who said she's pretty close to getting a pilcrow tattoo.

Robin: She said she's this close.

Kathryn: This close.

Robin: I wanted to say that we also in recent weeks have gotten support in three really wonderful ways that I wanted to explain. First, Michael in Minneapolis joined our new Eternal Optimist tier. That's $365 a year — in other words, a dollar a day — to be an Eternal Optimist on Substack. Jessie in Portland, Oregon, donated $13.07, which was her portion of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica settlement. I want you to know that Jessie also applied for company matching funds for that, which has required me to do a lot of paperwork, but honestly, it's worth it.

Kathryn: It's so worth it.

Robin: And Becca in Lake Forest, California, decided she wanted to stop shopping at Amazon but was having trouble. So she donated her Prime membership fee to Optimist Economy. And we're here keeping her accountable for that. Any of those ways we love. We love your money, of course, but we also love your creativity in how you decide to donate.

Kathryn: Absolutely love it. While we're on break, be sure to keep sending us questions because we're putting together a question-and-answer episode when we return.

Robin: Yeah, we'll record that a few weeks after we're back.

Kathryn: Yeah.

Robin: OK. Time for the marathon Retcon.

Kathryn: This is going to be a long Retcon. So first from America at 250: Case for the Defense. Yes, the high five is truly amazing. And I feel for the people who didn't live in the era of the high five. However, many listeners pointed out that before the high five there was the gimme five, which was typically around waist level. Similar action. I appreciate the reviewer origin story. Appreciate the reviewer who said when explaining where gimme five came from, that it is in fact inferior to the high five — that's on America 250 — and five is for the five digits. I know that other people thought that was obvious. That actually unlocked something in my brain when I realized it's for the five. Five fingers on your hand. But that's OK. Second, Retcon comes from overtime. We talked about how we could increase overtime in the U.S. by having it apply to more white-collar workers. Well, a recent study came out since we recorded that looked at the effect of the overtime salary cap increases that we've seen. So basically, if you raise the threshold for being eligible for overtime from say $20,000 to $40,000, what happens? Do people work more? And what they found is actually a lot of them just get salary bumps, so they're not eligible for overtime, which is a win on its own. What they gleaned from it was that the hour provisions might be tough for them to enforce, but also it turns out they had a lot of room in their salary budget to give everybody a raise so they wouldn't have to pay overtime.

Robin: I don't quite understand what you mean. The hours might be tough to enforce. You mean for the employer?

Kathryn: Yeah. Like if you made $35,000 a year and now you're subject to overtime, they have to track your hours — and they'd rather just not track your hours and they'd rather just give you $5,000 more a year.

Robin: Right. OK.

Kathryn: So they wouldn't have to pay the overtime. Not only would they have to not pay overtime, they wouldn't have to keep track of it.

Robin: I only glanced at this report, but they also didn't find that people got laid off. Right. There was no reduction in work either.

Kathryn: Yeah. The adverse consequences of raising the overtime threshold would be similar to the minimum wage. What is advertised about the minimum wage? Right. It's going to cause job loss. But it really didn't. It just — a bunch of people got salary increases so they wouldn't be eligible for overtime. All of these results would be in line with: employers have a lot of power and they're underpaying, and when you force them to pay more, they'll do it in the way that they prefer.

Robin: Yeah, that's most convenient to them. Yep. OK.

Kathryn: In the Social Security episode, I misstated the number of pensions. And I said 75% of Americans used to have pensions, but it really was 45%. And actually a TikTok follower commented that we misstated the share of American workers that had traditional pensions, even at their peak was still closer to 45%. So that was just a factual error I made in trying to make an argument that I don't know if it landed. And then very small aside, someone seemed to take umbrage at the joke that Robin and I made about reading the Economist where Robin said I was reading the Economist and I said, why do you hate yourself? And someone wrote in like really earnest and confused, like, why would you say that?

Robin: Talking about the British news magazine.

Kathryn: Yeah, the British news magazine, the Economist. I guess it was a little bit of an inside joke because we had shared an article that was particularly difficult to parse and yeah, yeah, I think it's, as a source of coverage it's high quality, but it's very dense and it's very conservative. And I think a lot of times it's inscrutable where like it's so dense sometimes you have trouble following the argument. But it ends up with like, we're smart and liberalism is bad. You're like, wait, what? So I think I find that the Economist is a tough read. Like, it's just not an easy, pleasant read.

Robin: It's not for you.

Kathryn: So that was mine.

Robin: My brother-in-law has taught me, rather than saying things are — he doesn't like them — it's not for me.

Kathryn: Oh, mine is. This is like, truly Southern. I just say it's not my favorite.

Robin: It's not my favorite.

Kathryn: Which is really fun having, like, your 3-year-old and 6-year-old say that back, like, we're going to try vegetables tonight. And they're like, it's not my favorite. Broccoli's not my favorite, Mom. The Economist is not my favorite. All right, now we can do the big Retcon, which is the most recent episode on health insurance.

Robin: By the way, you said health care through that entire episode.

Kathryn: I missed it. Even though you were like, it's — remember, they're two different things.

Robin: Two different things. Yeah.

Kathryn: I'm sure every health care — I'm just like, yep, 100% not gonna keep to that. It's so hard.

Robin: Anyway.

Kathryn: All right, health insurance, not care. Health insurance. We have some Retcons.

Robin: So the bad news for us is that the name Americares is taken. It's already in use by a disaster relief nonprofit that is doing wonderful work.

Kathryn: That's the worst part, is that there's such a good organization.

Robin: We did not mean to steal their name. Second, I was curious how many people actually work in the health insurance industry? So the closest I could find was a number that includes life and health insurance, and that was about 888,000 people in the United States last year. Though that number has been declining slowly but steadily since 2020. I think I also made an offhand comment that the population of Switzerland was 10 million people, but it's only 9 million people.

Kathryn: All right. My health insurance Retcon was: We didn't talk in the episode about the notion of job lock. When we said things that Americans would like about this new program is that you would have less job lock, which is the idea that you have to stay in a job because you have to keep your health insurance, either because other jobs don't offer health insurance, or you are locked into a specific plan that offers a benefit or a coverage that is important to your family. People who have severe medical conditions, they often say that they're job locked because they lose their current coverage. And according to Gallup, around 1 in 4 employees say that they have some degree of job lock where if health insurance wasn't a problem, they would leave their job.

Robin: And it's not just to go to another job. You know, it might be to quit working altogether. Retire early, but they can't because they're not eligible for Medicare yet.

Kathryn: And yeah, so we didn't talk about how Americans would like not being job locked, which even as I say it out loud, like, y'all don't want to be locked in place.

Robin: All right, state budgets. What is that?

Kathryn: OK. And then the other thing that I think was just such an omission — things that Americans would like about having one health insurance coverage plan from the federal government is that state governments wouldn't have to pay for it anymore.

Robin: Oh, because they're paying for Medicaid.

Kathryn: Roughly 30% of a state's budget goes to Medicaid, which is crazy considering that most Medicaid spending happens on the federal level. So even the cost-sharing part on states isn't even the majority of Medicaid spending. It's still around 30% of state budgets. So I think just imagine what education funding would look like in the U.S. if state budgets got 30% more room. It would be a really different world, especially for things like teacher pay, because they're state employees, they don't have many options of other ways to pay for teachers other than just state and local budgets. So freeing up state and local budgets by getting Medicaid paid off their books, it's a massive win that a lot of American people would cheer for. And with that ends our Retcon marathon, which we wanted to get in before the break.

Robin: God, that was a lot. OK. Terms and Conditions. You didn't look anything up this week?

Kathryn: No, I just didn't want to add to it. I felt like I added so much.

Robin: I did look this up last night. I looked up statutory leave because it was a way of phrasing this that I had not heard before. But statutory leave is time off that employers have to give you because it is in statute. It is required by law. This is, of course, a foreign concept to us in the United States because we, by and large, don't really have statutory leave, except maybe for something like jury duty or military service and, of course, the Family and Medical Leave Act. But we do not have it for vacation time, for time off, paid or unpaid. But apparently other places do. So, for instance, the EU sets a floor of 20 days of paid annual leave. In Japan, workers must take five days off, and employers must offer them 10 to 20 days off, depending on their tenure. We do not have that. That's a little preview of where we're going to go when we get to the big Pilcrow after this little break. I'll just start by saying, one of the things I love about the internet is when you go to look for a story you've seen in the last year, and you realize that people have been writing about this issue for 10 to 15 years — that Americans are bad at vacation. They don't take enough vacation. They don't use all their vacation time. They leave vacation on the table. They leave paid vacation time on the table. So I kind of went into this thinking, well, part of this measurement problem must be that people just don't actually get paid time off. Because we've talked so much about people don't even get sick days. But 88% of private sector workers get paid vacation time. I mean, I was surprised that the number was that high. It's not quite as high as Europe. But the problem then seems like we actually just don't even take off the time we have.

Kathryn: Right.

Robin: And that's our show.

Kathryn: Why don't Americans take vacation? If it is at least offered by our employers, why don't Americans take vacation?

Robin: Yeah. So I mean, my theory going into this is it's us. We're workaholics. We don't know how to unplug. It's an American culture thing. You don't think that's the case?

Kathryn: Well, I think there's an aspect that that's right. But I still think that that's employers' fault. Like, maybe you feel really guilty taking vacation, or you feel like the work would pile up if you were gone, or you'd be letting your co-workers down, or it would be like, more trouble than it's worth, because if you leave, you're just gonna come back to a massive mess that it'll take you a while to come back from. All of those are your employer's fault for not managing time or work or teams effectively. So, like, vacation is horrible if you're punished for it on the back end. But that being punished for it on the back end part, I mean, it just comes up, like, even with tone of like, well, it's a really hard week for us because next week, like, Jim's gonna be gone, so it's gonna be really hard on the rest of us. Like, how many people have had some boss say something like that?

Robin: I don't know. I don't work with Jim, but I worked in newspapers, and I always thought our problem was that, you know, newspapers come out every single day of the year. And so you can work a little bit ahead, but somebody's got to work every single day. Actually, a lot of people — people who print the newspaper, people who deliver the newspaper, people who lay out the pages, people who monitor breaking events. So I just thought, oh, well, my idea about vacation is just really screwed up because of the industry I worked in. And then after that, when I became a — I was freelancing, but I was on a retainer at a big company for a while and they just shut down for a week or two, depending on when the holiday breaks fell around Christmas and New Year's. And I was like, what? What kind of strange world is this?

Kathryn: This is an option.

Robin: Yeah. And they're like, yeah, well, most of our corporate clients are also just closed down at this time of year. It's like, but what if there's a fire? You know? Yeah.

Kathryn: So Robin's journalist mind actually can't get around the notion of it's OK for people to take weeks off at a time.

Robin: Yeah. I mean, it took me a long time anyway.

Kathryn: But then that would also come down to staffing. Like, if you're staffed razor thin so that the work can't be done, like the whole thing grinds to a halt because you don't have enough people. That just means you're not staffed effectively. Yeah. This is one of the No. 1 complaints that nurses make about hospitals is like, pay aside, we're staffed basically to the bone. Yeah, to the absolute, absolute bone.

Robin: There's no slack.

Kathryn: There is absolutely no slack in staffing. That makes it hard to take a vacation. That still comes down to the — this is the employer's fault. I know that the shift workers that we talked about, it made it really easy to see how people are treated like cogs in a machine because their shifts are scheduled like cogs in a machine. But you can be on salary and have no slack in staffing. That makes it so hard for you to take a vacation. And you have that same type of just-in-time treatment.

Robin: Yeah, for sure. When I left daily journalism, one of the things I did was I freelanced for places as a fill-in for vacations and leaves because I knew they had no slack. And I marketed myself as basically an editing temp who could come into your organization and edit almost anything because I was a generalist and I was fast. But it was still kind of a hard sell because they were just so not used to actually dealing with their staffing problems. I did that several times.

Kathryn: Well, you know, my dad was a judge and if he went on vacation, he would schedule a visiting judge — basically like a substitute teacher.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: If your staff's so thin, if you're managed so meanly, and if you are basically told that it's mean to co-workers for you to take time off, people are less willing to take vacation.

Robin: Yeah, I read this survey. This woman who did it, she's like an academic but studies travel and tourism. They did a survey of 860 full-time workers who had paid time off. And 20% of them suffered from vacation guilt — like they felt guilty about taking more than a day or two of vacation. And a lot of them, even if they had planned a vacation, they would dial it back and make it shorter. And then those who actually did plow ahead and take their vacation, they then actually felt penalized on the other side of it. And to me, there's kind of no telling as to whether there's a psychology issue here or a workplace issue here, or both. But anyway, vacation guilt — real thing. I believe it.

Kathryn: I would absolutely believe it. But it's, you know, especially if you're close to your co-workers — you just don't want to feel like you're leaving them. It's curable, though.

Robin: I mean, I guess it's an office culture problem.

Kathryn: It's an office culture problem that benefits the bottom line of companies. And so if they don't directly foster it or encourage it, I mean, they might not foster it, but they certainly benefit from it. So they wouldn't necessarily nip it in the bud. I even think having the weeks off at July 4th and Christmas — which a lot of companies will say everybody is off this week — I even think that's kind of bull. I'm like, OK, fine. But that just encourages people to take their vacations at the most expensive time of the year. It's like, hey, well we gave you off a week of July 4th, so taking a week vacation two weeks later — you know, everybody just had off. Like it's almost a way to manage vacation time off to be like the most efficient version of vacation for employers is either nobody takes it or it's managed so that it's all taken at the same time. You can corral people into doing that and then they feel guilt about taking vacation outside of the time that's given.

Robin: Right, right, exactly. You've just made it so everybody's away. Yeah.

Kathryn: Interesting to me when you talk about something like a vacation day — like, I voluntarily don't go to work and instead do something for myself or my family, and I still get paid for it. If there's a reason that's happening less, it's because worker power is on the decline. I mean, people feel less secure in their jobs. And more than likely, the way that that benefit is handed down is not as nice as it used to be or not as clear as it used to be.

Robin: I mean, how do we know whether people are taking fewer days off?

Kathryn: Great question. We actually have a really good idea because of the Current Population Survey. So the Current Population Survey is what we use to measure the unemployment rate, and it asks about the week of the 12th of the month. So were you at work the week of the 12th? Well, if you weren't at work but you still had a job, they ask you why. Like, why were you not at work the week of the 12th? And so they have a measurement of vacation over time, because that's one of the options. And vacation has just been on a slow decline for decades, where people used to be much more likely in the survey to have been gone the week of the 12th, and that's just been falling over time.

Robin: Do you know the actual numbers?

Kathryn: Yeah. So there is a column that The Washington Post, I think, still has. They have a column called the Department of Data.

Robin: Oh, yeah.

Kathryn: Run by this guy named Andrew Van Dam. And he has a column from 2023 called the Mystery of the Disappearing Vacation Day, where he goes through the data available in various sources to try to understand why Americans are taking less vacation. And he charts out that the percentage of Americans who are off at any given time in the survey used to be around 3% and is now closer to 1.5%. So it's about a 50% reduction in being gone for vacation.

Robin: That's crazy.

Kathryn: It's just because nobody goes on vacation on the 12th. I mean, you know, that's like — no, no. I mean, and it spikes. It's like a really spiky series. I mean, one thing that he points out is that the week of the 12th will never include Thanksgiving or Christmas, but it does capture the summer months. And so that's when most people take vacations in the summer, and that's where most of the decline in vacation is being taken, is in the summer months. So the column is trying to answer, why don't people take as much vacation? And, yeah, they talk about worker power. They talk about the guilt. It's frowned upon if you take vacation. But the upshot that this column comes to is it's because of how time off is structured now.

Robin: What do you mean?

Kathryn: Well, instead of having enumerated sick days and vacation days, you have a bundle of paid time off. Oh, some people do, I guess, but they talk about how the idea of having the PTO bundle as opposed to separately enumerated paid sick and paid vacation has led people to ration those days because they're worried they'll need it for something else.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: Yeah. So the decline in vacation is really a decline in people taking off five days.

Robin: Five days in a row, yeah.

Kathryn: A week-long vacation is what is kind of being erased from our workplace. And the story he comes up with is like, yes, it's declining worker power, but it's also people who are afraid to take five days because that's also their sick leave.

Robin: I have a friend who started a business with the unlimited time off policy. His business has been incredibly successful. Anyway, I ran into him and he was head down into his laptop and he was trying to rewrite his vacation policy because the belief is that a lot of people won't abuse it and they won't take that much time off. He said the people that do abuse it really abuse it. And it made everybody else really mad. So he was now just having to write a new vacation policy for his company.

Kathryn: Oh, my. My husband once got a job where he was like, hey, it's unlimited vacation days and time off. And I was like, no, it's not. It's fascist. And they're trying to guilt you. And they're playing on your guilt to not give you an enumerated sense of days that you have off. So you don't know because you'll underguess and then you just won't take time off at all. It's like, it's totally fascist. And I was like, and you can tell them your wife says so.

Robin: You know, I realized going into this episode that I really have — I don't know how many vacation days I get because it's accrued at some fraction. I mean, I should figure out it's probably like a minute and a half for every hour I work or something, right? So I really don't know. Like, if you ask me, do I have three weeks of vacation a year, do I have four weeks of vacation a year, do I have two weeks of vacation a year? I have no idea.

Kathryn: OK. If I remember correctly, it's like, if you work full time, you should accrue this per year, right?

Robin: And I would obviously accrue half of that, right, because I work half time. But to your point about not knowing, like, there's something about having like 20 days that the European Union insists that everybody get, you know, that you have 20 days, you don't have to go and say, well, have I accrued 40 hours so far? And 40 hours is one full-time week, right?

Kathryn: Like, oh no, there's like, there's no way to be like, hey, 170 million people working in the economy, you get 10 days off a year. No other policy is going to come close to that one for being clear, understandable. Everybody knows what they get, everybody gets what they get. Like you just say like you get 10 days off a year. And you would know it. Now there's part of it surely that people would, listening would say, like, well, vacations are also a lot more expensive.

Robin: Well, yeah, I just bought tickets to New York and yeah, yeah, I mean —

Kathryn: Vacations have gotten more expensive, so you might be less likely to take them. But I mean, what I would argue is, even though vacations are more expensive, there are still ways to make them cheap, right? Like you can still drive, especially if you had five days off. Like you could drive to your vacation instead of fly.

Robin: You don't actually even have to go anywhere. You just have to not work.

Kathryn: You just have to not work for five days. There are people who have very legitimate policy proposals that we need to have a mandatory, federally enumerated number of days off and that this will increase employment in the U.S. And honestly, they're not wrong. I just don't necessarily say that part.

Robin: So wait, so if we had statutory leave — if we had statutory leave, it would lead to more jobs.

Kathryn: Well, their contention is your headcount would have to be larger. Let's say you have to make 100 widgets, and you make 100 widgets with 20 people who on average take two vacation days a year. Then if those people got to take 10 vacation days a year, you're gonna need to have more than 20 people in order to produce the same number of widgets. The idea is in order to maintain staffing levels, maintain production, you'd have to increase staff. You'd have to increase staff, which a lot of people will tell you. Like, I mean, we had people write in about the overtime episode and we had so many people tell us that, especially people who were, who had been in the workforce a while, who were on third or fourth or fifth job, their third or fourth decade of working in the U.S. say, I cannot believe how hard my job is now, the amount of work on our shoulders, what we are expected to do, just how much it feels like we're in a vise in our workplace. It's all gotten worse. Where if everybody got 10 days, like, they'd have to staff more. Almost every company in the U.S. would have to staff more if every single person took 10 days off a year.

Robin: If they took it. I mean, I think that's a little bit the challenge we're up against now. Planet Money did actually an episode on this topic, you know, in their funny conversational style.

Kathryn: And not as funny as ours, though.

Robin: No, no, no, no. But anyway the figure for the amount of money that Americans like give their company by not claiming their vacation time is nuts. It was, I swear to God, it was like $65 billion a year or something. It was insane.

Kathryn: I believe it.

Robin: Yeah. And so there are places where if you don't use your vacation time, the companies have to pay you for it. And I think, I wonder if that would actually motivate companies to actually just have you take the time instead.

Kathryn: Oh, yeah, you could write into the law like a 10-day vacation. And if you have a company where you don't have enough people taking vacation, you have to start paying. Listen, fines can do a lot.

Robin: Well, I mean, there is also this thinking that Americans don't take vacation because we want to work more, because we are consumerist. We want to buy stuff. And I always do worry that people will just say, well, I won't take the time. I'll just take the money and use it as a down payment on a car. No, the economist doesn't care.

Kathryn: Well, I guess on some level, or rather a lot of American workers are up against so much that they would say taking 10 days vacation a year is a champagne problem. Like, it's just not one that they really have the luxury to handle because they need the money to do other things, that to me is a failure. If it's the case where you have tens of millions of workers who don't want to take time off even when it's paid, and they'd rather just get like the money as a bonus because they don't have enough money to live on. Like, vacation is like absolutely the symptom and not the disease or the cure. Right. And if we keep missing this mark, it's like an overall performance measure of just how well our economy works for people.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: So to give you guys a perspective of what we're talking about in terms of how important is paid vacation to a company's bottom line? Could they afford to pay more? The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a lot of different desks that measure a lot of different things. And one of them is called the ECEC, Employer Cost for Employee Compensation, which measures just how much it costs employers to pay their employees. And it's not solely the wages, but total benefits.

Robin: Sure. And does it break it down?

Kathryn: So sick leave is 1% of total compensation amongst private sector workers in the U.S. OK. Holiday is 2.2%. Vacation is 3.8%. Total benefits, which is benefits aside from your cash wage, is around 29.5%.

Robin: And that's mostly your health care and maybe contributions to your retirement.

Kathryn: So right now, with the paltry amount of vacation that Americans take ..

Robin: Health insurance, by the way.

Kathryn: Oh, for fuck's sake. I will never get this right. It's gonna be tough for me. I mean, yeah, the vacation is 3.8% of cost. So I'm like, y'all, those are rookie numbers. Let's get that number. Let's get that number.

Robin: I read this other survey that was a survey of 3,000 U.S. workers, and they looked at the people who didn't even take one day of vacation last year. 23% of the people they surveyed didn't take one day of vacation. And they asked them why, and 43% said their workload was too heavy, 34% that they didn't have enough days. I'm going to guess that that maybe includes people who didn't really have days, because this survey was not limited to people who had paid time off. 30% were afraid of falling behind, and 29% felt guilty. And 19% said they were discouraged by their employer.

Kathryn: Fascist. See, that's just employers being bad employers and being fascist.

Robin: I mean, and you saw that Pew study that found — and this was, I think, 2023 — found that 46% of people took less than the total paid time off that they were offered that was available to them. I want you to know I don't have that problem. I got hired, you know, like, right before the pandemic. And then so I actually accrued a lot of vacation time that there was no place to go, you know. But I noticed that this year, I actually have taken more than I've accrued.

Kathryn: Hey, I have this really formative undergraduate memory when it comes to taking vacation. So for a long time, I went to UT Austin. The economics department offered a class called Marxist Economics. And, you know, it's a — I'm —

Robin: Just trying to imagine that at Texas.

Kathryn: OK, yeah, yeah, there's Marxist there. So I'm like, all right, I'll bite. I'll take Marxist Economics. Like, why not?

Robin: Don't tell the people in the social medias that you've taken Marxist Economics. It's all over.

Kathryn: Well, I actually ended up dropping the class. So I didn't finish it. It was a rough semester, but.

Robin: It's because you're a garbage communist.

Kathryn: It's because I'm a garbage communist. I didn't even finish Marxist Economics.

Robin: OK, sorry.

Kathryn: So it's really fun. It's fun. So Marxist economics was an amazing — like, I didn't end up finishing the class. I had to drop it because I loved college. I just loved taking classes and I would take like five or six classes a semester. And that semester I was like, I'm not going to make it through. So I dropped Marxist economics. But the professor — he was kind of a weird guy, but in Marxist economics he said, you know, the basic conceit of capitalism versus Marxism — like, we are not going to have a Marxist revolution today. But he was like, carry out the little — I'm trying to remember. Imagine what is a more frightening thought for conservatives than a public school professor telling students, carry on little Marxist revolutions in your life. But he brought up, you know, slack off at work. Like, they put the internet in front of you. What are you going to be mad if you go browse the web or do something? He's like, yeah, slack off at work, like stick it to him — like, they own you, man. And this was his like crazy Marxist belief of like, just, you know — he's like, they don't want you to do anything but sit at that computer or sit at that desk or sit on that line and work. And they don't want you to eat, they don't want you to sleep, they don't want you to breathe, they want you to work. And anytime that you can, you should. I thought that was hilarious. Because he's like, state legislators in Congress have to require employers to give you a break. You think they want you to eat? They don't want you to sleep, they don't want you to do any of that. They want you to be a slave at the machine doing whatever they want. You are not a human to them. He was really a firebrand, but he made it so clear in a way that wasn't practical but was still appealing — that, you know, your employers own you, and they act like they own you. And if you don't want them to own you, like, fight back. And sometimes you don't have any power at all. And the only way you can fight back is, like, you know, text while you're at work or go on the internet while you're at work to look for another job and, like, take all the vacation they give you. Your employer makes more money off of you if you don't take paid time off. Don't give it to them. Like, don't give them your life. Don't give them more of your life than they already take. So, yes, it was inspired by Marxist economics. And I can, like, go down in history as the bad garbage communist. Yeah. Once he said it, I was like, oh, yeah, you have a really good point. They absolutely don't. Your employer does not want you to take any vacation. They don't want anyone anywhere working for them to ever be sick or ever take vacation.

Robin: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but before I was an opinion editor, I was a travel editor, and my —

Kathryn: Yeah, I'm just gonna say it: Lesbians have the best jobs.

Robin: We do. I was not the only lesbian in that department, actually, now that you say that. Anyway, I was an assistant editor, and my beat was the western United States. But one of the things that we were dealing with or thinking about in our coverage at this time — it was like, gosh, it was after early 2000s, 2005, 6ish — was that people were taking shorter vacations. Right. That they were taking long weekends, two days off. And there were a lot of flights now available to get from, say, Los Angeles to Portland easily or Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, and thinking about ways that people could take a quick getaway. So, I mean, I think that those things used to be cheaper, hotels were cheaper, airlines were cheaper, but that they also don't get at the fundamental thing about what we hope vacation does for people, which is, granted, just give them time to do what they need to do, but also to avoid burnout and to sort of rest and relax. And so as a result of that job, which I really loved — it was the best job job — I took a lot of those trips. But it was also exhausting. Like, it was exhausting to plan. It was exhausting to go away for three days and then come right back into work. And you'd kind of let whatever would normally get done at your house over the weekend not get done. Right. And right after that, I went into another role, and it was in that role where I was like, the ideal vacation is three weeks long.

Kathryn: Yeah.

Robin: The ideal vacation is a week to come down from the stress, a week to actually enjoy your vacation, and then a week to mentally prepare to come back, like, so that you're coming back in a good place.

Kathryn: Oh, no. And then it also makes vacations less of a competitive sport. You know, like, if you have longer time in a place, your vacation is less exhausting if you actually have time to go there. Like, oh, no. Remember, you need two days just to sit and stare into the middle distance.

Robin: Exactly.

Kathryn: Like, why do we do all this? Like, why do we earn money and have jobs if we don't get to go out and actually enjoy things outside of work? Like, yes, I like it when people have careers with purpose, but if their career doesn't have purpose, their vacation should still be a vacation. Like, it's — we give up these inches after inches after inches, and then you end up with these — like, now what? Like, how often does The New York Times do 48 hours in blank.

Robin: Yeah, 36.

Kathryn: You don't sleep. They don't put in the part where you're taking speed so that you can make it through your vacation because it's so exhausting. You have exactly 36 hours to have a good time. Have a good time.

Robin: Exactly.

Kathryn: Oh, I need like 360 hours. It is really tough how close we all live just to capacity and not taking vacation or doing 36-hour trips and that's it. So take all the vacation you have. I mean, how's this for our optimist? That guy at Costco in Arizona pulling down $33 an hour. He's been to Europe twice. How many times have you been to Europe? Your employer sucks. Like, take the vacation. If they will reward you for not taking vacation like you do, it's a terrible place to work. Like, don't worry about it. That's not official advice.

Robin: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

Kathryn: I'm not a lawyer. That's not official advice. But take the vacation.

Robin: Do we even think it's — I mean, this feels really remote to me. Far from — like, for some reason, I feel like the job scheduling problem is so fixable and I feel like mandating vacation time for everybody in America just seems like so — it seems like a pipe dream to me, really. I don't know, the fact that we don't have it after all of this time and that we just think that companies and businesses should just dictate everything about their environment, like they're little fiefdoms.

Kathryn: Well, OK, yes, but back to shift scheduling. We also have not touched the Fair Labor Standards Act in a really long time. So it's not as if labor law is, you know, just flourishing and we're doing so much for workers. But like this is kind of untouchable, like it's fate.

Robin: But this isn't — it's not like this is happening in 22 states. Right.

Kathryn: I mean, it's not something — I think a lot of people wouldn't prioritize it. Right. That they're prioritizing the minimum wage, they're prioritizing the shift scheduling laws and overtime and that this is seen as a bonus. A lot of workers get it already. This is eminently doable. I think that employers would freak out and do it anyway. Like, this really strikes me as a cry-wolf scenario. Like if you required paid sick days and paid vacation days and you enumerated a minimum standard for workers in the U.S. for everyone — part time, full time, level playing field — absolutely. Everyone gets at least this. In areas where they've done that for sick leave, there's this massive uproar about how much it's going to cost, especially small businesses, and then everybody's fine. Is it a pipe dream to have paid vacation in the United States?

Robin: Mandated vacation, statutory leave.

Kathryn: Is statutory leave a pipe dream? I don't think so.

Robin: OK, I'll take that as optimism.

Kathryn: You'll take that optimism? I mean, I don't think so for a few reasons. That is like practically speaking, because it's not very costly to employers. I mean, this is a fraction of their total compensation that goes to paid vacation and paid sick as it is. So for a lot of companies this means it wouldn't really change much of their policy. It would really extend vacation and sick for certain parts of the wage distribution. In that case, if they cry wolf, like we've had a long enough natural experiment to know that companies like Costco offer really good vacation and they still have a company. And so if you say that paid vacation is going to bust you and you won't be able to have a business anymore, that just means you don't run a business well, or that you don't have a viable business. I think that the number of companies that have moved in this space show how viable it is. I think there's room to bargain because we haven't touched the Fair Labor Standards Act in a long time. That is where my — it's not necessarily a pipe dream — comes from because we're going to come to the table with a lot of demands.

Robin: OK. Anything else?

Kathryn: I hope everybody takes a vacation soon. Even if it's just as my husband and I often say when burnt out from children, at the end of the evening, like, I think I'm gonna go watch a screensaver. One night after we put the kids to bed, he was like, yo, you know what I could watch right now? The pipes. Just the pipes screensaver. I could watch that for a half hour. And I was like, I could. I could watch five episodes of that.

Robin: We have that Apple TV screensaver that does the really high-def drone slow-motion shots. We do actually literally watch it. It's mesmerizing. In fact, it's my spiritual sponsor. It's what's getting me through this. It gets me through a lot of weeks is like, oh, look, is that — is that China or is that — oh, no, that's Argentina. Yeah. OK. Oh, the Scottish coast. Oh, yeah. I love this one.

Kathryn: Yeah. All right. That is the Pilcrow. Everybody take vacation. Let's get vacation.

Robin: And when we come back, executive orders and spiritual sponsors. OK. And we're back. Executive orders.

Kathryn: All right. Well, my executive order in honor of recently passing the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that we need an Americans with Children Act to change accessibility and appropriateness of our greater surroundings.

Robin: I'm sorry, so it's accessible to children.

Kathryn: Yeah, I mean like, or like people —

Robin: — or adults with children.

Kathryn: Here's where this executive order came to me from. So I'm trying to get my 3-year-old to wash her hands after she goes to the bathroom because they're not good at it. And so I had to get her to wash her hands. But sinks are taller than her and there's no, like, they're not required to have like a step for a little person to get up to wash her hands at the sink. So I have to hold her Superman style over the sink with her legs kicking behind her as she's got her hands out under the water trying to get it and then at some point trying to get the soap onto her hands while I'm holding. It's like, really, like underneath one arm. Get the soap in there. And like, this woman was waiting at the bathroom door for me. And you would think, like, oh, wow, I'm struggling with the child in public. Surely people will look at you kindly. No, they don't. It's like, wow, hate to be that girl's mother. Just like, it's so much disdain. And I was like, you know, a stool would really help me. And I'm not gonna fall into the trap of being a mom that carries it around because society won't meet me where I am. So this is just as much as, like, you have to have stools under sinks. And if you have a billboard or a sign, it can't be graphic or inappropriate.

Robin: I would appreciate that.

Kathryn: It's like, just like a nicer world.

Robin: I'd appreciate the stools.

Kathryn: Yeah, the stools. The, like, billboards can't have inappropriate things. Like, listen, I know that there's a lot of listeners out there and a lot of people out there that love seeing big titties. But, like, I don't think it belongs on a billboard that I pass with my children because I don't know what. I still don't know what they're selling. Like, it might be clothing.

Robin: Shoes.

Kathryn: It might be clothing or shoes, but she sure as hell ain't wearing any. It's just like, this is just not appropriate for children. Like, why? I mean, this would go in with like, cars need to have more colors. But, like, just at a basic level, if a kid walks through a public space and there's something really, like, grotesquely inappropriate, like, why is it like, we can change society so children get to walk through the world and not be horrified, ruined, exposed — put those titties away — and that they were able to wash their hands. Hands probably one of the more important parts. So the Americans with Children Act. I'm really excited. ACA is not taken. So.

Robin: All right. My executive order is that my NWSL club, Angel City, needs to win at home. I mean, I could just end there, but the threat I'm making is they need to win at home before I buy any more merch. Especially not that really, really amazing looking new sweatshirt they've got. It's got the Angel City crest on the front and it says everyone watches women's sports, you know, on the back. And it's really nice, but I am not buying it until they win at home.

Kathryn: They're home losers, right? Like, they just never win at home. They've run some crazy upsets on the road.

Robin: We're the worst team in the league.

Kathryn: Well, it's a pretty close league.

Robin: We lose so badly.

Kathryn: Anyway, it wasn't a good run.

Robin: We're still ahead of the Houston Dash, so there's that.

Kathryn: OK, great. Good.

Robin: All right. My spiritual sponsor this week is the western fence lizard. These are very common in Southern California. They're everywhere. For some reason, for the last few years they have seemed very large. Like, they're usually little skinny lizards, and now they're beefing up. I don't know if they've got more bugs. I don't know what's happening. But what's so adorable about them is that they get up on a fence post or on the edge of a curb or the top of a wall, and then they do these little push-ups and they're just fantastic. And that's my spiritual sponsor this week.

Kathryn: I love that. OK. My spiritual sponsor is also a lizard. It's an anole lizard, which is really common in Houston. They're like these little guys, they're like this big. They have really big red necks. So the neck will puff out red and then go back. So you'll see this flash of red.

Robin: Oh, that's a very fancy lizard compared to my lizards.

Kathryn: Yes. They've got like a red beard, so it's like you don't see anything and then it's bright red. They turn green and brown. They love the trees. They love our houses. They eat bugs. And they often crawl right along the window where I work. So I just see these little lizards coming by and they're all over the side of the house. I think I brought this up last season, but the day the lizard gets in the house is like a great day for my kids because it becomes — they watch a lot of Wild Kratts, and so they're like, we gotta protect — I'm not kidding.

Robin: They watch a lot of what?

Kathryn: Wild Kratts. Wild Kratts. Sorry, are you unfamiliar with the canon of Wild Kratts? It's a PBS show about two brothers, the Kratt brothers, that go explore nature and they learn about animals.

Robin: And they rescue the lizards in your house? Your kids?

Kathryn: Yeah, and so my kids become little Wild Kratts and they rescue the lizard which is, like, the most fun thing they'll do. Just, like, get the lizard, help him, keep him safe.

Robin: If the lizard got in our house, it would be like, we'd never see it again. The cats would have a great time. It would be not pretty.

Kathryn: I mean, the first time I saw one in the house, I mean, because they really do blend in, and they totally freeze when they see people. And so I was going down under a coffee table to grab a book, and then I was like, oh, there's a lizard, like, looking right at me. So these tiny little lizards crawling all over our house that do things like eat roaches. Like, they're amazing. Those little lizards are my spiritual sponsor.

Robin: Very good. We're going to be off for four, five, six weeks. We don't know exactly.

Kathryn: Oh, my God. If it's six, I'm gonna come back like smoking, like, with, like, I'll have picked up a smoking habit if after six weeks I'm like, yeah, I just need more time, you know, it's fine. I smoke now. Everyone says it's okay.

Robin: Take care. Be safe.

Kathryn: Take care and be safe. The Optimist Economy podcast is edited by Sofi LaLonde. Our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson. Thank you, Andy and Sofi. Video clips from the show for you to see are available on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn. I recommend doing a scroll of Facebook because Facebook olds do not understand what we are or that we're a podcast.

Robin: We could use some people who would defend our honor there.

Kathryn: There's a lot of people who feel like Robin doesn't let me talk on Facebook. It's a wild ride. Otherwise, please check out our T-shirts and tote bags, which are on our website as we prepare for more merch. Go to optimisteconomy.com.

Robin: If you're on Substack, free or paid, you can join our Optimist Economy Chat. And if you have the means to contribute in whatever creative way you want to constitute that, we will happily take your gift at optimisteconomy.com. And we're done.

Kathryn: And we're done.

Robin: We're on vacation. Let's go get a drink.