By Jim Hagarty
2006
The long Victoria Day weekend (in May in Canada, honouring Queen Victoria) is over and it’s back to work to get some rest. From working. Raking, sweeping, shovelling, bagging, trimming, cutting lawn, cleaning eavestroughs. Beating back nature in all its forms to maintain our carved-out little space in what used to be dense forest (which it will probably be again some day).
Fun, fun, fun.
Back to work just to read a Toronto Star story entitled, Do we work too much? Asking almost any Canadian that question is like asking whether or not a 12-pound robin is fat. Of course we work too much. A Readers Digest story this month says many of today’s employers, far from having to deal with absenteeism, are having to cope with the rising levels of “presenteeism” in their workforces. They can’t keep us away from our jobs.
The same story reported shocking statistics about how many of us don’t even take all the holidays that are allowed us by law and by our employers. Why is that?
The Star story compared us to European countries where people have a much different, maybe a healthier, attitude to work and vacations. Apparently the average Canadian worked 1,751 hours in 2004, about 300 hours – or 43 seven-hour days – more than the Dutch, Germans, French or Danes. We worked almost nine weeks more that year than they did. Sweden apparently has the highest ratio of industrial robots in the world and a very high productivity rate as well, which allows for more leisure time. Leisure time spent leisurely.
Europeans have a much more relaxed attitude towards nudity in spas and at beaches and about alcohol and food. In Heidelberg, Germany, men and women relax in a bathhouse (where clothing is not allowed) built a hundred years ago on the ruins of a Roman bath. In Rome itself, at outdoor restaurants, people spend several hours in the evening enjoying seven-course meals and watching the world go by, especially tourists who can’t even slow down on holidays and who eat mainly to survive.
In rural parts of Ireland, whole families including the dog, wander down to the pub almost every night to enjoy the company of their friends, neighbours and relatives. Over here, someone who goes to the pub every night has a drinking problem, we believe. Those who sit in their basement drinking beer and watching hockey, even alone, don’t. The exact opposite is true over there. The ones who drink alone at home are the ones with the problem.
A large German industrial firm in Munich offers new employees six weeks of vacation in their first year. Over here, we can legally expect to get two and would have to stay with a firm almost a lifetime to work our way up to six and if we do deserve six weeks off a year, the company begins to look at us as a liability.
The irony is, all this hard labour, according to economists, doesn’t seem to be making our country any more productive than European states. And certainly doesn’t make us any happier, assuming it ever could, though I recently read a piece by a guy who stuck up for his workaholism and said he’s most alive when he’s working. True, maybe, till he falls over dead from working too hard.
The sad part is, we don’t switch from labour mode to relaxation gear as we pull into our driveways. In fact, that’s often when our hardest work begins. We spend summers yanking out every weed and fixing up the cottage.
The Toronto Star article asks: “Will Canadians or Americans ever start working less? The past 25 years suggest not. Between 1980 and 2000, European countries added, on average, six vacation days or statutory holidays, totalling 36 per year. Meanwhile … Canada actually dropped a day, to 24, while the United States lost two days, to 20 days off.”
Why are we moving in the opposite direction to the Europeans? Is all this tension helping to create the aggressiveness that is leading us into wars around the world? And before the letters start pouring in, yes, Europe is not perfect. That’s why there are so many former Europeans living in North America.
This column, by the way, was written after everyone had left the newspaper office and gone home. (To cut their lawns.)
