No summer vacation? You’re not alone

Nearly 50 percent of American workers won’t be going anywhere on vacation in the next three months because of the higher cost of living, according to an exclusive poll for Newsweek, while 60 percent of those who are going said affordability still played a huge role in their planning.

The poll, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek, suggests that the uncertainty surrounding the state of the U.S. economy, which may or may not face a recession in the coming months, has spilled over onto workers, making them less inclined to take time off and go on vacation.

The survey was conducted on June 25 using a sample of 1,500 eligible voters in the United States.

It found that 49 percent of respondents do not intend to travel in the next three months, but would have gone if the cost of living had been cheaper. Some 12 percent of respondents said they had intended to travel abroad, 31 percent said they would have traveled domestically, and 9 percent said they would have done both.

Why Aren’t Americans Taking Vacations?

The rising cost of living seems to play a major role in decisions about vacations.

Out of 60 percent of respondents who said they were affected in their choice of vacation by affordability, 52 percent chose to travel to a cheaper destination than they would otherwise have visited, while 48 percent are traveling for a shorter number of days than ideally intended.

Roman Peskin, co-founder and CEO of ELVTR, a Los Angeles-based e-learning provider, was on vacation in Verona, Italy, with his family when he told Newsweek about a similar survey conducted by his company, which found that even when Americans take holidays, they never quite switch off from work.

As part of a poll conducted by ELVTR among a sample of 2,300 Americans, 68 percent admitted to working on vacation, with 37 percent saying they were taking less time off because of fears of a looming recession, and 18 percent saying they canceled plans altogether because of that same reason.

According to the survey, only 1 in 4 Americans enjoy their vacation without work distractions, while 28 percent answer emails, 25 percent receive text messages, and 6 percent do work phone calls on holiday.

“Here we are,” said the vacationing Peskin, explaining that he’s part of the growing group of Americans who, for different reasons, sacrifice their downtime to check their inbox or hop on a call that cannot be rescheduled.

“It’s understandable in my case because I’m the CEO,” he said, “but this is one of the things we started to notice in our online courses, our students seemed to be burned out and exhausted and we asked them why. And we noticed people weren’t taking vacation anymore.”

While in Europe it is mandatory for workers to take vacations, the U.S. doesn’t have such rules—allowing them not to take any at all.

The ELVTR poll found that people continue working even on vacation because they are afraid of being judged by their colleagues and bosses for taking time off, or they “feel that they can’t afford not to work,” Peskin said.

“They believe they could be fired, or not get the promotion that they’re looking for, if for example they don’t respond to an email while on vacation,” he added. “There’s a feeling that job security has dropped for most people. And naturally, when that happens, then people try to work harder and not take more vacations.”

Some of those people—27 percent—said they worked on holidays because they apparently just love their job. But 58 percent felt obliged to work while off.

According to Elise Gould, an economist at the Washington-based non-profit the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), workers on lower incomes generally take fewer vacations.

“Vacation time in this country is incredibly skewed towards people with higher incomes, so that it is much less likely that somebody who makes lower wages gets it,” she told Newsweek. “About 95 percent of the highest-wage workers actually do get paid vacation days and only 44 percent—less than half—of lower-wage workers get any paid vacation days.”

A Fundamental Mismatch

Economists and labor experts say that workers who feel the overall jobs market is worse this year are, fundamentally, under a false impression.

“The labor market is actually quite strong in the U.S. right now,” Gould said. “Unemployment rate has remained pretty low, we’re still adding jobs, and pulling more people back into the labor market from a recession. So we really have been chugging along.”

But the perception of a majority of Americans, said Gould, is that the economy is doing poorly.

“I think there’s some concern about what the Federal Reserve has been doing and whether or not there’s going to be a recession,” she said. “Fewer people are quitting their jobs the way they were a year ago, trying to find better jobs. I think that more people are staying put.”

For Gregory DeFreitas, professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Labor and Democracy at Hofstra University, New York, one key reason that workers might think the U.S. economy is in such bad shape is wages, which have not kept up with the rising cost of living.

“While the job market is strong, by most measures, wage growth isn’t,” he told Newsweek. “We actually had a fall in real wages by nearly 2 percent in the first quarter of this year. With prices rising on average faster than wages, a lot of Americans feel that something’s very much wrong.”

DeFreitas said that American workers today, “as has been true for a long time, have very little power, very little leverage, even in a tight job market.”

“Only 6 percent of American workers today are in a union, which tells you a lot about their very limited bargaining power,” he added. On top of that, non-compete clauses often prevent workers from leaving their job and moving up in the industry in competing companies.

“And so it’s understandable that the no-vacation nation image of the U.S. is still very true,” DeFreitas said.

It’s not only about money

While the rising cost of living has affected many Americans’ decision on whether or not to go on vacation this summer, a majority (52 percent) said they had no plan to go “in any event.”

Perhaps surprisingly, one factor in people’s travel plans seems to be the environmental impact. While 35 percent didn’t consider their carbon footprint when taking vacations, some 65 percent of people said they would somehow consider it, even if only a small amount (20 percent of respondents), a fair amount (30 percent) or a significant amount (15 percent).

According to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of Americans say addressing climate change should be a top priority for President Joe Biden and Congress this year, while 34 percent say it’s important but not a priority. Nearly seven in ten Americans (69 percent) are in favor of the U.S. becoming carbon neutral by 2050.