Survey: Should You Get the Day Off Today?

Survey: Should You Get the Day Off Today?

It is a holiday in much of the English speaking world on the first Monday in August; it is a day off in the Caribbean to the south of America and Canada to the north. It is not in honour of anything in particular; it is just that somebody decided that we all deserved a three day weekend at the height of summer. But not in America; it's nose to the grindstone as usual. Walter Kim, writing in the New York Times, called America "a nation of remarkably productive, often well-paid workers who are becoming increasingly reluctant to pause from their labors and refresh their souls -- a nation whose cash-drenched corporate employers typically don't pay for much time off (less than two weeks annually, on average), a nation whose globe-gripping federal government is the only one in the whole industrialized world not to legally require generous periods of paid kick-back-and-hang time -- is a nation that's socially screwed up, particularly in comparison with European countries like France, which orders its citizens outside to play for the entire month of August and a few other weeks spread through the year."