ALT-3 Should us Workers be Guaranteed more Vacation Time – Yes
As of now, U.S employers are not required by law to provide vacation time to their workers. Theoretically, any employer can ask a prospective employee to work without cessation for all possible working days in a year, a fact which fills many people with a dark Orwellian foreboding. Is such a feat possible? The answer depends on the type of labor market being discussed.
Employers, by and large, are beasts of efficiency. The natural method of market competition, which only rewards the most cost-effective production standards and practices, requires such behavior. Unfortunately, this driving market force can ignore standards of ethics and morality that ordinarily require we eschew certain forms of 'efficient production', such as slavery or child labor.
One can take an exception to those practices using a number of different tactics and philosophies. Utilitarians and their ilk may argue that while it is certainly financially profitable to require small children to work many hours without pay, the economic and social costs of such actions are forbiddingly large and far outweigh any potential benefit of using those impressionable youngsters as sources of physical labor. Similarly, one may argue that the institution of slavery, while it furnishes a nation with cheap goods and a steady supply of labor, is too costly in terms of the moral and ethical compromises that must be made to sustain its existence. It is important to note that these examples illustrate situations where financial profitability does not account for unquantifiable costs, and that kind of loss of information can lead a rational decision maker to some destructive and woefully violent paths.
Can we then use this utilitarian framework that argues for the existence and importance of unquantifiable costs to show that providing no vacation time to workers imposes a similar hidden cost on society?
First we must ask if vacation time is significantly important to workers that its deprivation would severely damage their happiness and well being. The UN declaration of human rights includes Article 24, which states "1. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay." In addition, Article 23 states "3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection." The United Nations saw fit to unequivocally proclaim leisure a human right. Though this evidence is anecdotal, it speaks to the importance and benefits of leisure time.
Secondly, if we allow that the deprivation of vacation time does in fact present a detriment to human health and happiness, we must question whether or not this negative consequence is large enough to warrant intervention, and whether the system is entrenched enough to warrant legislation and governmental regulation. In other words, does the government fail in its duty to protect its citizens from harm by allowing employers to ask their employees to work without vacation? Does the free market solution regarding vacation time allowances sometimes produce results that deprive some people of human happiness, dignity, and well being? Arguably, yes. It also preferentially selects the poor and uneducated workforce as its victim.
Lets examine why this is the case. Low skill jobs suffer from an oversupply of labor, the number of people willing and able to work may exceed the number of positions available. This glut of willing workers reduces the necessity for employers to compete amongst one another to capture potential employees. Working conditions and wages may fall below acceptable conditions, but the threats and realities of poverty and unemployment will keep new workers coming in the company's door despite the unattractive conditions. Such turnover means no one worker or group of workers will have significant enough bargaining power to leverage the employer to commit more resources to improving working conditions, wages, or benefits. Workers who are significantly dissatisfied may be fired and replaced quickly, as the jobs are simple enough that work experience confers only a small gain in productivity. While this system is highly sustainable from a financial perspective, its economic and social costs can be both large and sinister.
In addition, such industries that find it necessary to use large volumes of unskilled and uneducated labor typically exhibit low marginal profit on their goods and services. Competition amongst companies is fierce, and small advantages can lead to large shifts in market control. This fact ties companies to using the most efficient and widely adopted practices at any time, or they risk failure. If most companies within an industry mandate no vacation time be awarded to their workers, those that refuse to do so will lose a competitive advantage and be subject to a greater risk of failure and bankruptcy. In such a case, no rational and well-educated team of professionals would choose to award their workers vacation time, for to do so would spell certain economic peril and would entail a great risk for all parties involved. Even the meager wages being paid to workers would be lost, and then their position would certainly be worse than if they were simply working a job that provided no vacation time.
Therefore, given the oversupply of workers and the fierce competition between companies whose industries exhibit low profit margins, changes must occur across the entire market simultaneously so that no company is penalized more than any other for adopting a minimum standard of vacation time for its employees. Barring an industry-wide revolution, such changes are not likely to occur without outside intervention.
