Incorruptible Mass

15. Vacation: Why don't we have any?

August 06, 2021 Anna Callahan Season 4 Episode 15
Incorruptible Mass
15. Vacation: Why don't we have any?
Show Notes Transcript

The US is one of the worst countries in providing vacation for workers.  We do not require that employers provide any paid vacation, or any paid holidays.  This doesn't make us more productive, just more stressed.  Massachusetts could lead on this, providing a legislative example for other states while offering policy that is good for everyone.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of Incorruptible Massachusetts season 4 episode 15.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 8/6/2021 by CFH and FL.]

Anna Callahan  0:02  
Hey there, you're listening to Incorruptible Mass, where we talk about how broken our State House is, what we could have if we fixed it for 7 million people in Massachusetts, and how you can get involved! So we had a super fun live podcast last week, we'll be posting that. You probably will already have that in your inbox before you even read this. But next week, we're taking a break. And in the spirit of taking a break, taking a vacation, we thought that we would talk about... vacation time! And the fact that the US doesn't have any! And the idea that Massachusetts maybe could lead the country in providing vacation time for people.

Jordan Berg Powers  0:50  
Yeah.

Jonathan Cohn  0:51  
Could do quick intros,

Anna Callahan  0:53  
Of course! Yes! Quick intros-- I'm beginning to forget those nowadays.

Jonathan Cohn  1:01  
Hopefully, people who are listening or watching already know who are.

Anna Callahan  1:05  
But let's do it. Let's do it.

Jonathan Cohn  1:08  
Uh, Jonathan Cohn. He/him, have been active in progressive issue and electoral campaigns here for eight years. Hitting exactly eight years since I've moved here on August 1.

Jordan Berg Powers  1:18  
Wow. Jordan Berg Powers, I use he/him and I have eleven years experience-- I hate saying that because it feels like "I'm like, oh, Jonathan [INAUDIBLE], I have eleven [INAUDIBLE]." It's the total opposite of how I feel about the world. So I will start to say that I have experience working in progressive politics 'cause it just feels weird.

Anna Callahan  1:36  
I am Anna Callahan, she/her, living in Medford, and have a little bit of experience doing state politics, doing other politics. So alright! Vacation time! Does anyone *need* vacation time? Why don't we just *never* have vacation time for the rest of our lives?

Jonathan Cohn  1:52  
I feel like saying that. Granted that these balloons are always here every day of the year. But today, they can honor the fact that if people want to take up paid time off for their birthday, they should be able to.

Jordan Berg Powers  2:05  
Oh, I like this.

Jonathan Cohn  2:06  
Yeah. Under Massachusetts law, they do not have the ability to do so.

Jordan Berg Powers  2:11  
Or anywhere in the US.

Jonathan Cohn  2:12  
Or anywhere in the US. Because we have a whopping *zero* days of guaranteed paid time off.

Jordan Berg Powers  2:20  
Yeah, it's I think we think, "Well, you know, like, I have a salary so I can take time, or oh well that job's hard, I get that they should probably get it." But in most countries, if you work at McDonald's, you get time off. You can call your boss and say, "hey, I want to take two-- I want to take a week off, two weeks off. Don't schedule me for those weeks." And you can't get fired for that. Crazy.

Anna Callahan  2:44  
And people *do* too. Right? They actually take days.

Jordan Berg Powers  2:47  
Yes!

Anna Callahan  2:47  
They don't just have the *ability* by *law* to take vacations. They *actually* take vacations!

Jordan Berg Powers  2:53  
Yeah, there's an insidious thing that's going on which I actually started to research for our organization where people have, they say, like, you can have unlimited time, which makes sense to me, because I sort of just trust my work, and that's sort of functionally how we work at my organization, is we let people take off when they want to take off. But what's happening in Silicon Valley is that people just never take time off, because they say, "Oh, you have unlimited," which is a nice way of saying you have zero.

Anna Callahan  3:19  
Yeah, I actually know someone who works in the Bay Area. And he and his girlfriend had been living in Germany for five years. They moved back to the US. He got a job for a tech company that said he had unlimited time off. So he started taking the normal amount of time off. But in Germany, everyone they knew took every year in Germany, like four or five weeks-- and the company was like, "Oh, you can't take *that* time off!" They quietly pull them aside and were like, "No, that doesn't fit into our company culture."

Jonathan Cohn  3:54  
It reminds me in terms of the contrast with Europe it reminds me of years ago, my family went to Italy and it was in August. This is back in the mid-2000s. I remember a tour guide constantly telling us everywhere we went, "It's usually more crowded than this, but everybody is at the beach in August."

Anna Callahan  4:12  
That's why it's called bear agosto because it is empty. Everywhere in Italy empties out because no one is home.

Jonathan Cohn  4:19  
Yeah. [laughs]

Jordan Berg Powers  4:21  
And I think it's important to note people think their their jobs are hard. And I just want to say that your job is probably not as hard as some of the people who clean our offices. That's usually their second job. Like I talked all the time to the people who clean our offices at Mass Alliance and every person who came in it was their second cleaning job. People who are on their feet all day long-- all day long they're on their feet serving us. These are the future of jobs in America. These are the jobs which are growing the most. And these are the jobs that need the most time off. These are the jobs that need time. People need time to not be working and to  know that a paycheck is still going to be coming in the mail. They need that time off because America is a stressful place, it's especially a stressful place if you are working class or struggling to get by. It is really stressful. And then on top of that, you're on your feet, you're serving people, you're on those things-- people need time to recover, to be okay, to have protection away from time off. So, I just want to say that it's really important that people get this time. It's really important, and we don't do it. It's just bonkers that we're the only country in the world where this is true.

Jonathan Cohn  5:44  
And it's striking just to look at international standards for that. Often when we think about places with greater benefits and worker protections-- we default to think of the social democratic leaning countries in Europe, in the way that Denmark gives 25 days of paid vacation, Finland 25, France 25, Norway 25, Austria 25, Sweden 25. But it's not *just* those states. If you look at the ones that give them more than that, like Kuwait gives 30, Burkina Faso has 30, Bahrain has 30, Peru has 30, Algeria has 30, Panama has 30.

Jordan Berg Powers  6:25  
Algeria?!

Jonathan Cohn  6:26  
Yeah.

Jordan Berg Powers  6:28  
Yeah. I-- go ahead. Sorry.

Jonathan Cohn  6:30  
Yeah. And it's striking when equitorial, Guinea, I think I mentioned, has 30, all these places with more than the social democratic countries in Europe. And the US can't even get to-- it's funny-- given how I'd say you may think that the US would talk about a number of countries, we don't talk about why can't we have as robust worker protections as Algeria, but they're doing better than we are?

Anna Callahan  7:02  
Yeah, and talking about who needs vacation, there is a strike right now at the Frito Lay company, one of the Frito Lay locations, because they have people who do 12 hour shifts, which already is really unhealthy. It's not good for your body and for your mind to be doing these 12 hour shifts, but they have people they said, who had been working for five months without one day off! That means no weekends. We're literally seven days a week for five full months. And this is what they're striking about. One of their demands is vacation, and not just vacation, like whatever happened to the 40 Hour Work Week? So there are serious problems in the United States. We're just really abusing this thing that we just have no laws around it.

Jordan Berg Powers  7:57  
I think it's important because I always say this, that there are some really terrible places to live. And I won't say terrible places. There are places that are oppressive to regular people, people just trying to get by, live their lives, have kids and things. And there are some really dangerous and places that exploit workers. America is also one of those places for a lot of Americans. And Americans-- the one thing I *never* say is, oh, how lazy Americans are. Unless we're talking about millionaires and billionaires, because *those* people are lazy. But regular people, regular Americans work really hard. We are an overworked country. We're an overstressed country and overworked country.

Jordan Berg Powers  8:36  
This reminds me of a conversation with a legislator I had. So I worked on the sick time legislation. It's one of the proudest things we did. Massachusetts was the first state in the country, the first one in this country, we had zero guaranteed paid time off for any reason, right. And Massachusetts was the first state to guarantee paid time off or sick time. And I remember but we couldn't pass it through the legislature. We had to take it directly to the people. And because a Democratic legislator said to me, to my face, that the reason that they I guess I won't gender the person but the reason that they didn't want to vote for it is because they owned a workplace. And what if one of their workers wasn't really sick? And they wanted to take time off and I was like then they take the day, the one day, like what is wrong with you people? Keep in mind, they barely work two days a week. Right? They have side hustles, like they don't work 40 hours a week. They barely... Like some of them do. I guess it's unfair. THe state legislature as a whole some of them do because it's a make-work place. Some of them put their time in, but most of them don't. You know, this person had time to run a whole other business. And they ran it. They didn't work it. They weren't on their feet, right, serving people. And, like, I just didn't know. I realized also in that moment that I am not made out for lobbying because I just said to the person, 'what's wrong with you?' I'm not gonna pretend that that's an okay answer to that question. And I just realized that I, you know, shout out to the people who have to pretend that that's an okay thing to say and try to convince them otherwise.

Anna Callahan  10:22  
I disagree. I think no one should pretend that's an okay thing to say. We would have much better politics if no one pretended that was an okay thing to say. You know, people get power and then people treat them as if everything that comes out of their mouth is good. And that's part of the problem. That's why they don't think they're saying anything wrong, because no one is willing to say to them, 'Hey, what are you talking about? Like, are you crazy?' We need more people willing to say that to them.

Jordan Berg Powers  10:52  
Yeah, I wish it was that thoughtful. It was just a reaction of like, 'wait what?' It was an immediate 'What? I don't know what is happening.' Yeah. So I just want to say that like, this is what we're dealing with, right? This idea that Americans are privileged, like we are privileged, because we're at the top end of a horrific world capitalist system, like we are benefitting from that. But what I do want to say is that this idea that, you know, there's these lazy people that if we just, God forbid, we give them time off, right? But that's humanity. People need to rest. You know, for those religious folks, there's even a little thing in this book that talks about it. You should open it up occasionally, you might learn some things, if you care about it. So like, you know, people are not made for that. And just the idea that our legislature, it would be incredulous that they couldn't even pass sick time. You know, you couldn't even get like sick time time off is just, it's just bonkers.

Anna Callahan  11:54  
But we did. So recently, we got something passed. 

Jordan Berg Powers  11:57  
Voters did.

Anna Callahan  11:58  
Voters got something passed.

Jordan Berg Powers  12:00  
Yeah. And then they got paid family leave, which is not a bad legislation, and where we should be proud of the work that activists did to force our legislature to do what they otherwise would never do, which is to have paid family leave. But you know, one of the things that was said, often in opposition to sick time by the corporate lobbyists was like, 'once you get some time off, then people will be demanding time off.' And I would always say 'yes. People should have time off.' Like, that's a thing. 

Jonathan Cohn  12:33  
Yeah! 

Jordan Berg Powers  12:33  
You know, Algeria, it's like 30 days, at least. Kuwait is like 30 days, at least. Panama, right? Like, these places are like, yeah, because that's the moral thing to do.

Anna Callahan  12:42  
Yeah, we also talk about the culture of the State House. And I think it's important that we talk about the culture of workaholism in America. You know, I read a great book on Denmark, about the culture of work there. And saying that somebody who got a job at Lego over there, and they. on their first day, they were handed a piece of paper with all these ways to be successful in this company. And among those ways were you were not smarter than anybody else, you do not work harder, anybody else, don't show up before the boss, don't go home after the boss. So they really look down on people who.. and this is a broad cultural thing there about wealth. It is not okay to do conspicuous consumption in Denmark, right? You are not to drive up your Lamborghini, that's just not a thing. And in terms of work culture, people take time off, people work from like nine to four, and they have a nice lunch in the middle of that day. And that is their work culture. And it is not incentivized to show up early, to stay later, to work through lunch, to go on the weekends, to be online constantly whether you're at work or not. That is just not the culture there. And it's much much healthier.

Jordan Berg Powers  14:04  
Yeah, I just want to say also like so I think enough time has passed. I had a dodgy, the word they would use there is a dodgy ability to work in Great Britain. But was working. And it was quasi-legally and I remember that I would work like you know, I would work 5, 6, 7 o'clock at night and people just did not understand. And they were like, you know, four o'clock they're going to the pub. Like four o'clock that's dinner. You go to the pub like that is what you do. It doesn't mean you're necessarily drinking. You know, you could be eating, you can have a soda like lots of people, but that's the culture right, like four o'clock. So it's not just Denmark that has this. Most places where people who are workers understand that their lives are not connected to the rich people who they're making money for. Right, like they understand that they work for those people, but their lives aren't connected to those people. They don't believe that they're somehow better than or deserve them. So they clock out, they go home. They're just done

Anna Callahan  15:12  
We also forget that people who are working 60-70 hours a week, whether it's at one job, or whether it's because they have two or three jobs, they are not productive. They're not productive for those extra hours. But we are literally wasting that time in people's lives. Because that does not add to the productivity. I want us to talk a little bit about Massachusetts, and about the idea of vacation time. And whether we think that, you know,  if we pass something here in Massachusetts, would that help us pass it in other places? That's what the right does. They have ALEC, they have this thing that produces legislation designed to be passed in states and they just try and get it passed somewhere in some deeply red state, and then they cookie cutter it to other states. Like, is this something in terms of vacation time? Do we think this is something that if we pass something strong here in Massachusetts, that could influence other states to get something strong?

Jonathan Cohn  16:16  
I would definitely say yes. Because if you think about it, it's currently not really even in the discussion in most states about something that they should be passing. I know that it started percolating as something to get filed in the few states. In New York, there was legislation filed to have 10 days of paid time off but ithasn't become law yet. And I know nationally, back in 2015, Bernie Sanders filed legislation to have at least 10 days of guaranteed paid time off, but it's something that you'll hear pop up periodically. But if you have somebody actually do it, it helps set the example of like, well, this is the new benchmark for what kind of a good benefits package should look like in a state. And it probably also even has a regional impact. And I would like to think that if Massachusetts were to do that that would have at least some pressure on the other states in New England at least. Because if you're someone who can easily travel in between why wouldn't you go to this state? Why wouldn't you want to work in the state that gives that as opposed to the one that doesn't?

Jordan Berg Powers  17:28  
Yeah, I mean, look at what happened with sick time. And look what happened with paid family leave. These things, they ping pong off each other once ideas start to get pushed, right. And workers start to expect it. As well they should. Or look at how the eight hour workday happened. Right. It wasn't bestowed by the national government. It was state by state, it was fight by fight, right? Like, that's how we get these things. So if Massachusetts could lead on these things, if we could care, and I want to say like, what does it mean to lead right? Like, we're a representational democracy, it would be caring about the people who you represent, and saying, like, they deserve basic dignity at work, right? Like that's what it means to care. That's what it means to lead on this. It means to say, yes, in Massachusetts, every worker deserves time paid off. Because they're humans, and that's the way it should be. That's what it means. Right? Like that's what it means to lead on this and so yes, Massachusetts can lead on it. I just want to say also because I misspoke. There are other countries apparently that have zero. We when we used to do this we would do research and so apparently Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau and Tonga, which I believe are also maybe connected to the US some of these, also don't have any paid time off. I thought that they were protectorates but I I don't obviously know for sure. So they also have zero paid leave. But I think the other thing too that's interesting, I want you to people who are listening to Google the Wikipedia list of paid time off. We also have no paid holidays. Right? Like we have holidays. We have days you get to take off Mondays, but they aren't guaranteed pay. We also don't have like paid leave for a five day work week. Right? So, you know, you can if you take the family medical act right, like you can sort of if you're salaried, right? But there's no guarantee that you'll get money if you want to have a child and take some time off. And so we're zeroes across the board for every human indicator, every care.

Anna Callahan  19:38  
You know, we we didn't mention... I was going to specifically mention that so I'm glad you brought it up. Maternity leave, paternity leave like these are really cruel policies, to not allow parents to spend time with their newborns is inexcusable. That is really something that is just... Obviously it's also inexcusable that we don't have time off when we're sick, we don't have just normally time off. But the idea that parents who have a baby do not have any paid time to be with those kids. And there are countries where, you know, there's like 18 months of time off between the two parents. And you know, in some countries they insist that some of it is taken by the Father. So, you know, we have a long way to go, before we match up with any of these, you know, these other places, leading the world.

Jordan Berg Powers  20:32  
I think it's important to point out that it's really any country. Like for us to catch up to almost every country, for us to catch up to Nigeria, to Philippines, which are the bottom of the list. And above us.

Jonathan Cohn  20:45  
And to your point, Jordan, a lot of those places that also listed it as a zero are free associated states of the US. So I was just checking that because it sounded familiar and that like Marshall Islands, has a compact of free association with the US. So does Palaua and so does Micronesia.

Anna Callahan  21:07  
So we're talking about three countries. Now we're down from six to three or seven to four or something.

Jordan Berg Powers  21:11  
Yeah, it's just a shame. It's just a real shame that we don't care about our people this way. I just want to do one lesson to shout out since it's the Olympics, I just want to say sports should be political. [INAUDIBLE]

Anna Callahan  21:31  
Fantastic. Totally agree. Great. We are going to take a little vacation speaking of vacation, we won't see you all. Well, actually, we'll probably release one per week anyway, because we got a live podcast. But yeah, see you on the flip side.

Jonathan Cohn  21:46  
And it will be August.