;Even in good times, when the labor market was at its most powerful, U.S. workers didn’t use their leverage to secure more time off. The average American gets two weeks vacation annually; the average European, six. A recent study by the Families and Work Institute found that a significant number of American workers did not even take the relatively paltry vacation time coming to them. One-quarter of the employees interviewed for the study said they do not take all of the vacation to which they are entitled “because of the demands of their jobs.”
