Why Don't Americans Have Longer Vacations? [View All]

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Workers in Western Europe have faced some cuts in their social benefits of late, but no one is touching their vacations: four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, plus those long holiday weekends. It doesn't mean they are all loafing, certainly not the Germans, who are cranking out exports. The German unemployment rate has fallen to 7.6 percent, compared with 9.5 percent in the United States.

Americans have long complained that they have to put in more hours, to please their bosses and save their jobs, and that sometimes they can't take the entire two weeks they have earned.

What explains the vacation gap between the United States and Europe? Are the differences really as stark as they appear?
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It’s August again. That means that while the French buff their tans along the Mediterranean, Swedes feast on crayfish in the Baltic archipelago and Germans shed their clothes on Ibiza, it’s business as usual for America’s hamburger-flipping, minimum-waged, vacation-deprived drones. Two weeks out of 52, while the Europeans measure their legally mandated vacation time in months. Is there no justice?

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/8/4/why-dont-americans-have-longer-vacations/vacations-the-us-europe-gap-isnt-as-wide-as-you-think