How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Take Vacation This Summer
There’s a big reason airports and resorts are booked up this summer: Americans are taking off work and vacationing more than they have in over a decade. In some cases, their employers are forcing them to. The pandemic, along with jitters about a potential recession, dampened U.S.
workers’ eagerness to take paid time off in recent years. Now, many vacation-bound employees say they’re over such worries. More working adults took vacation days in the first half of 2023 than they did in prepandemic years, according to data from the Labor Department.
Company vacation calendars show more workers are checking out, and for longer stretches, this summer. The number of employees logging vacation days climbed 11% in June compared with the same month in 2022 and 20% compared with June 2021, according to human-resources technology firm Gusto, which tracks time-off requests from workers at more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses. The amount of time they took off also rose, by 5% from last year to an average 32 hours.
John Skeel, 58 years old, didn’t go on any vacations during the thick of Covid-19, and the longest time he’d taken off in recent memory was a long weekend. After a layoff several years ago, he worried about taking extended time away from his job—particularly as companies in tech and other industries cut jobs last year. This summer, he decided he and wife needed a serious vacation no matter what.
They went away for three weeks in June, first on an 11-day cruise around Southern Europe, then several days in London and Scotland. It made him wish he’d taken such vacations sooner, he said. “I feel as if I’ve done myself and my family a disservice by not taking more time," he said.
Read more on livemint.com
