NO TIME, NO MONEY
Plenty of people do not take as much vacation as they are entitled to or need. But that is because many can’t. They may live in a notorious no-vacation-nation such as the US, the only advanced economy that does not guarantee workers paid holidays.
Or they might have a manager who pressures them to keep working. Or they might be poor.
Even in the relatively wealthy European Union, 29 per cent of citizens could not afford a one week holiday away from home last year, official data shows. That’s down from 40 per cent in 2013, so things are improving. But the figure soars among the poorest, as it does outside the EU, and it’s not necessarily because people are retired or unemployed.
“I haven’t had a holiday for 13 years,” a British woman in her 50s with three low-paying jobs told researchers studying the rise of in-work poverty before the pandemic. “In fact, if I can, I take annual leave so I can work somewhere else.”
The point here is not that Rishi Sunak is one of the wealthiest prime ministers the UK has ever had. The more relevant fact is that, pandemic aside, he has considerably more freedom to go on a family holiday if he chooses than many of those he leads.
Of course, this assumes he actively wants to go on such a vacation. Many people do not. Margaret Thatcher was famously not fond of holidaying. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to be phenomenally anti-vacation.
Michael O’Leary, the voluble chief executive of budget airline Ryanair, once told me he only went on family beach holidays because he had to, and could tolerate building sandcastles with the kids for precisely five minutes. “After that it’s, ‘Oh Jesus, will someone come and rescue me!’ I’m praying for a crisis.”
There is no great shame in this. A lot of successful leaders feel the same way. One long-running study by Harvard Business School academics of how chief executives of large companies spend their time, found they worked on 70 per cent of their vacation days, for an average of more than two hours a day.
Source: CNA
