August 2002 - In search of the leisure ethic

If you are reading this on holiday it might be best if you stop now. You know it is going to be about work and you should have left all that behind for a while. If you are not yet on holiday then get your bags packed quickly and go. This is no time to be thinking about the office.

I know this because I have just returned from a two-week break on an island where there were no newspapers and I had no access to TV or radio.

Before I went, the newspapers were full of gloom in the markets. The US economy was on the decline, chief executives were losing their jobs and the column inches devoted to corporate greed and the dangers associated with stock options seemed to be growing by the day. Two weeks later, nothing seems to have changed. So why worry?

This seems to be the attitude of most of the 300 UK financial directors canvassed in a survey by Reed Accountancy Personnel, a UK recruitment business, and Accountancy Age magazine. Asked whether they would delay their holidays because of worrying economic trends, four out of five of the directors said "no".

It should be said that this was a very British survey. If any similar survey were to be carried out in the US we might expect the reverse to be the case.

There are few other areas in the capitalist system where transatlantic attitudes differ so widely. Europeans tend to have long breaks from work with statutory annual holiday entitlement set at between four and six weeks in most countries.

In the US, about half of employers now offer three weeks' vacation each year to new recruits and the rest maintain the old standard of two weeks a year, sometimes adding a week for those with more than five years' service. But as Cindy Aron pointed out in her book, Working at Play, A History of Vacations in the United States,* American vacations are set by company policy or union agreement, not by nationally defined standards. "Americans thus enjoy their vacations not as a right of citizenship, but as a discretion of their employers," she writes.

It seems odd that a country that endows its citizens with the constitutional right to bear arms has never sought to similarly enshrine the right to enjoy time away from work.

Then again, given the deeply rooted New England ideals among its founding fathers, venerating the work ethic, we might expect the same psychological approach to be reflected in attitudes to leisure .

Ms Aron confirms that this is not only the case today but that it underpins the development of US leisure habits.

"Nineteenth-century vacationers could not so easily bring their work with them, but they often fashioned vacations that served as substitutes for work. Troubled by idleness we, like they, continue to find ways to make our vacations worthwhile endeavours."

This explains why Disney about five years ago created The Disney Institute at its Florida complex, allowing people to spend their holidays taking courses. One workshop, called "Time Quest" teaches you how to plan, prioritise and set "value-based goals" for your professional or academic life. So you can go on holiday to learn how to improve the way you work. Only in America.

It is high time that Americans begin to import a little more European liberalism and sang-froid into their work ethic. The Europeans, particularly the British, have opened their arms to so many US management ideas, that it would seem only fair that American employers reciprocate on holidays. After all, the religious arguments against enjoying leisure time were dismissed years ago. Ms Aron quotes the "Work and Play" speech made by Horace Bushnell, the Hartford, Connecticut-based Congregationalist minister, in 1848 when he argued that people worked so that they could play.

There remained some strong debate about what could be conceived as acceptable leisure but the point had been made: it was okay to relax and have fun.

No one epitomised the transformation in theological thinking better than Bushnell's contemporary, Henry Ward Beecher, a minister preaching in Indianapolis.

Within a few short years, Beecher changed from Protestant firebrand warning against the temptations of idleness to America's first champion of chill-out, arguing that to enjoy a holiday you needed to display a "decided genius for leisure ". Beecher practised what he preached; he thought nothing of taking a two-month holiday every summer.

The US needs more of his kind. A leisure ethic, rather than a work ethic, would allow the British, too, to import more holiday thinking into the workplace - a touch of manana, heavily layered with procrastination.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve the leisure ethic when we have the kind of holidays where we stay connected. Taking the mobile phone on holiday is bad enough. Taking the laptop away is unforgiveable. In my island hideaway there was a fine for anyone caught using a mobile phone in the pub. Fortunately the signal was so weak it rendered them almost useless.

I can recommend the isolated chill-out holiday as an antidote to the workplace. For those who base themselves at home it is becoming essential. No one warned me before I began working from home that it becomes difficult to be out of touch.

The closer we are to electronic communications and the media, the more we become slaves to our own curiosity. It is so obvious it never occurred to me.

But stepping away is not the complete answer when you return to a mountain of mail and a stream of unopened e-mails. At least this should produce something of interest, but it does not.

No one missed me. My presence was not required at any meeting. Life went on perfectly well without me, just as it does without the finance director. That's the way it should be.

* Working at Play, A History of Vacations in the United States, by Cindy S. Aron, is published by Oxford University Press, price £11.39

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