(Originally posted 17 May 2007. As an entrepreneur, it takes on a more direct relevance to me these days. See also, "the next generation of professional malcontents.")
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Professional malcontents have invented yet another faux reason to hate America:
The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers any paid vacation time, according to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. As a result, 1 in 4 private-sector workers in the U.S. do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. It is flunk-the-final wrong.
Consider three alternative work arrangements, each entailing the same job function and pecuniary compensation:
A. Work eight hours straight.
B. Work nine hours with a one-hour break.
C. Work nine hours with two 30-minute breaks.
All tastes and preferences are subjective, and different people might prefer one schedule over the others for a variety of reasons. But by what bizarre calculus would anyone summarily declare one arrangement "superior" to the others for all workers in all contexts? And who would dare say that Option A is "oppressive" relative to Options B and C simply because Option A does not provide a "paid lunch break"? Finally, who could, with a straight face, insist that a society that restricts the ability to even offer Option A is morally superior to a society that permits it? Since when is a more free society ethically subordinate to a less free society? What are these fools thinking?
Meanwhile, who really pays for those "paid" breaks in Options B and C? Of course not the employer — he's paying the same money for the same work in each scenario. The employee is obviously paying herself for the breaks — by foregoing an hour of free time elsewhere during her day.
The analysis regarding "paid vacation days" rather than "paid lunch breaks" is exactly the same — no difference whatsoever. The only person who can "pay" an employee for a paid day off is the employee herself. Working in the private sector means you perform a certain quantum of work over a certain quantum of time and receive a certain quantum of compensation in free exchange. The fact that the quantum of work is spread out over the quantum of time in a certain irregular pattern due to "vacation days" is as irrelevant as whether the "paid" days off are called "holidays" or "vacation days" or "personal days" or "family care days" or "zoop days." You work what you work and you get paid what you get paid. And if you don't like it, then don't take the job.
And the fact that, in America, competent consenting adults are free to make whatever mutually voluntary "days off" employment arrangements they want — including having no "paid days off" at all — is precisely what makes our system superior — morally and consequentially — to those who feel a need to baby-sit workers and assume that they are all gullible drones who will inevitably be "exploited" by their employers. To imagine that it could somehow be the other way around (i.e., that less free is morally superior to more free) is to demonstrate either an unforgivable naivete or (far more likely) an intentional, dishonest, ulterior motive.
This is the same obnoxious fraud that underlies the notion that "corporations don't pay enough tax." Corporations cannot pay any tax — only individuals can pay tax. Every cent in tax that a business remits to a government was in fact paid either by a customer (as a higher price), by a worker (as a lower wage) or by an entrepreneur (as a lower profit).
And this fraud reaches its apogee — it is the most extreme an abomination — in the context of Social Security taxes: the fact that one's employer remits a "matching tax" to the federal government on top of the tax directly deducted from a worker's paycheck does not mean that the worker isn't the one actually paying both. Whether the tax — which the worker pays in its entirety — actually appears as a line item on the worker's pay stub or not is utterly irrelevant: the worker pays it all. It's an accounting scam deliberately concocted by the New Deal government to confuse people into thinking that "someone else is paying for me."
Bottom Line: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch break. Or a free day off. Or a free Social Security "contribution." And shame on those who, like CEPR, insolently try to persuade the economically illiterate otherwise.