good evening welcome to moral politics i'm your host valerie to rico tonight we're going to be talk acing on the topic of mandatory paid vacation time our guest tonight is john de gras the movie producer and author and he was you may recognize him as the producer of the show affluenza or he recently has seen his recent documentary the motherhood manifesto he's bucking the trend we've hear in this time of economic crisis we're hearing a lot about cutting benefits packages for all kinds of folks but john digraph thinks that what this country actually needs is mandatory paid vacation time thank you for joining us again you be so so most people would say are you nuts most people don't say that they don't actually most people say what a great idea most people think what a great oh absolutely but during this time of economic crisis sure because because people are more stressed now  they're they're facing much more pressure in their lives and so forth and the idea of having some kind of safety valve for that thing is all the more appealing so so you have people who are actually feeling like they that's another story you know you find very few people who want to work fifty two weeks out of the year and the kind of long hours that americans are working and not have the opportunity to see their kids and their families and take them somewhere and rekindle the romance that they have with their spouse or their partner or whatever i mean vacation just offers a whole lot of wonderful things for people i guess what seems contrarian though during this time of economic downturn or crisis some people say it's the worst in our lifetimes that businesses are so close to the bone can they really afford to be paying vacation time they can't afford not to  because they're paying and will pay greater and greater health care costs if we don't do this vacation is a huge health preserver for all of us and health protector there is actually research on that on that there's tons of research we look at europe we see countries where the minimum paid vacation in every european country is four weeks twenty days after the first year of work and most people get five weeks six weeks and so on what do we find in those countries we find that they have only about half the levels of heart disease hypertension and type two diabetes after age fifty as is the case in the united states but there are lots of other factors in terms of differences in lifestyle difference you know  yeah this is not the only path actor but time is a huge factor because the overwork in america some three hundred hours more per year three hundred three hundred fifty hours more per year than is the average in europe takes away from all kinds of important things that people do for their health for example it makes it pushes us to eat faster to eat more junk fast food is is a response to not having a lot of time it means that we exercise less it means that we socialize less absolutely fundamental thing and it means that we're constantly more stressed and we don't have a safety valve that allows and an escape from that so this is this is a huge issue for health we're seeing that people who don't take regular vacations are if they're male thirty percent more likely to suffer from heart disease if they're female fifty percent more likely if they haven't had a vacation in six years for example they're about eight times as likely to suffer from our disease weiss is likely to suffer from depression all of those kind of things are costly california people get paid vacation most people do but they don't do very much they don't get nearly enough we did a poll last year that found that  about seven b two percent of americans had some paid vacation time in two thousand and seven twenty eight percent of workers had no paid vacation time at all in two thousand and seven nationwide and what do it is i have to say mark for me to imagine working year in year out year after year with no paid or no vacation time whatsoever to those people take unpaid leave what are some of them do take a little unpaid leave if they can they can get that some of them about five percent of those people even have it in their contracts that they're supposed to get paid vacation but they don't end up being allowed to take it now in most cases they get paid a little extra because they work i'll tell you the service situation i was in florida i was trying to fly back to seattle i was in jacksonville florida my flight was canceled and i couldn't fly out until the following afternoon so i thought well i'm not going to sit in the jacksonville airport overnight do all that kind of stuff fork out the sixty bucks and go into a cheap chain motel mind by the airport and do some work and so that's exactly what i did when i got to the desk the woman who was working at the desk said well how are you and normally i just say fine that would have been the end of the sky should but i said well i'm not so fine because i had told her told me my vacation was just cancel i said well what do you mean she said for the seventh year in a row and i said excuse me what do you mean and she said well i get it i have a contract that says that i get two weeks of paid vacation time i've worked for this hotel chain for twelve years and for the front first five years i always got to take my vacation the last seven years i haven't been able to they've always said they downsize they've always said we can't let you go i said how can they do that if it's in your contract she says they pay me two extra weeks time that doesn't seem equivalent to no it doesn't i mean it's i got a concert and she said believe me i need the time i'm going crazy here i don't want the money i want the time but i can't afford to lose this job xyrem a single mom i have a kid who's about ready to start college in the fall i don't have anywhere else to go i mean she said this she said this i'm saying this much more dramatically and she said she said it very  stoically and this is so thank you people at this is with people except this i wonder if this is happening in other places and so we polled and we found the twenty three twenty eight percent of americans say they got no paid vacation time  n two thousand and seven another twenty four percent got a week or less so this is half the population getting a week or less vacation only twenty two percent of the population had three weeks or more you could mandate paid vacation you need to get them out the door and have them take a recreation time or you you can face a fine for that you know this seems like it wouldn't work you know a number of companies seem to be moving towards this thing where they kind of give you a chunk in differentiated leave which includes your sick leave and your vacation time and so people often want to squirrel at least some of that away in case they have a mad medical emergency yeah i don't want to i'm not i'm not fond of the paid time off system but if we have it and if we continue with it what we need to do is this i believe that in the next session of congress we will pass what was called the healthy families act it's a it's ted kennedy's bill it may be the bill that congress honors ted kennedy for all of his years of service for what it does is it grants seven days of paid sick leave to american workers right now we're the only investor country in the world that doesn't guarantee paid sick leave to workers so we have about half of all american workers who don't get any paid sick days so they come to work sick they get other people sick it's a disaster ok so so kennedy's bill would give seven days so what are seven days a sickly so is that  time off bank and we have a mandatory vacation bill then whatever the length of vacation is that we site then you're paid time off needs to be seven days longer yet so you know yeah you can do paid time off but you still have to  and we can't prevent i mean even if it is there is a time off is that kind of a way of nickel and dime in people so that you're actually end up with fewer sure total payday cure it it's a good deal for really young healthy people and it's a really without having health insurance if you're young and healthy you know although there's always a catastrophe you know want that to happen to you but for the most part the odds are with are are with you but when you get to a certain age when you don't have health care or you have children that don't have health care it's a whole other story and that's why we have to make it universal and that's why we have to make occasional there's so they've said that there's some chance that this bill will get passed the healthy families act i think it's a i think it i think it will get passed think it will have got congress wants to do this barack obama has clearly said he will sign this but that's the that's the second thing that sickly is there really any chance in the forseeable future of getting mandatory paid vacation we are probably not yet in congress although we've had conversations with people in the senate about this there's definitely some interest in there is there's even one senator who's interested in introducing legislation but the odds are not very good that this would get through the senate probably a good chance   you know i think what you need to do is go to congress and tell him that story about the mother who didn't get to go on vacation for seven years so i don't have to have told people and what they've said i mean there are certainly sympathetic senate staff and people out there they like their people like what it is that we're trying to do but one of the things that they've said is you know with with the minimum wage and with sick leave you've proved you have proven that voters influence the national congress that the people actually want this people want this and that it's not going to destroy us that we're going to need to do with a mandatory paid vacation oh i think so yeah i think we need to we need to win this and you know probably in a state like washington  you know i like to see see that happen and you know it's a funny thing that there's that there's only really there's a few parts of the united states that actually have mandatory paid vacation there are yeah where puerto top of that very thing that makes people more productive who's going to line up against it let's show you how to make people more productive and new zealand did a study for example and they discovered that after two weeks vacation workers who came back got  average an extra hour of quality sleep and their reaction times on the job were thirty to forty percent faster than when they left for vacation and these were gains that actually lasted for a period of a few months than  had to do you know they were off but but nonetheless they came back and energized they came back productive there are lots of studies that show and the companies that do this find that their workers are more creative climber any he started making pete times base the event of his own little brand of peat ons he made some money on that and then he then he started making climbing clothing and then he went from that everybody loved that name went from that to founding this patagonia he's written a book it's called let my people go surfing let my people go surfing yeah and he's in ventura california so his people can go surfing but what he does is he gives them great flexibility in time and vacation benefits family leave all those those kind of things he has a phenomenally stable workforce people want to work at that company they want to stay at that company and they do a great job in patagonia profitable if there's all this data information research that shows actually that even even without considering the fact that companies you know externalize some of the cost of injuries and things like that that you're saying there's actually measurable benefits on the job why doesn't why don't we have this well there's a lot of things we don't have that we ought to have why don't we have universal health care not paid for by companies there would be nothing more in the interest of companies in in this country than to favor a single payer health care system which would take them off the hook there's nothing that makes american companies less competitive in the world market than having to pay these enormous health care costs but you know what i mean we had stories about you know people with eternal wait lists in canada for you know trying to get a heart surgery trying to get in you know not heart surgery there's a little bit longer wait time to get certain kind of elective surgery in canada than here people get asked fast or faster those kind of things that involve white life threatening things and so what you're saying is a world health organization or is saying that the united states is not one of the faster countries in providing else or are you serious absolutely we're not the worst but we're not right up there on the top there are a number of countries where there were services it's faster and the united states health care system ranks thirty seventh according to the world world health organization if you look at who's number one in health care again i mean same old story is western european countries the netherlands is number one then it's denmark austria france italy and so forth when you look at all these kind of things speed of service universality of coverage how it works how how it is what kind of outcomes and outcomes is amazing thing because what we have to look at is if you look at american health outcomes he hears a situation we spend half the world's health care budget half the world's health care budget our health care outcomes are arguably the worst of any industrial country well by and certainly if you compare what you're talking return on investment we've got some of the worst of any worth only return on investment and were paying the most yeah yeah yeah yeah what's go us look at look who we stand life expectancy nine hundred eighty before we got into this whole year on your ownership you know privatization deregulation tax cutting you know ownership society kind of kind of stuff that we've been caught up with in the last thirty years or so one hundred eighty the united states rank the length and life expectancy people in ten other countries live longer than we did but eleven that's not so bad today we're forty six you know height is an interesting factor after world war two you know americans were the tallest people on the planet today people in almost all the european countries are taller than we are the dutch who are an inch shorter than americans after world war two are now three inches taller the average dutch male today is six feet one half inch tall the fundamental predictor of height is the welfare of children how well children are treated care how all kinds kinds of things of that sort how kids are so it's a funny thing that any look at unicef which rates countries industrial countries by how they treat children by the way unicef big study looking at the figures match up precisely unicef figures on the welfare of children and what they measure how well kids are doing you've got the neverland sweden norway denmark finland etc exactly the same countries that go down to the pyramid in terms of being the tallest people you know i think are so many americans who perceive those countries as having a fundamentally different value system than we do in a negative way right that this is the land of opportunity people can make it or break it on their own yeah he really has a right to get rich round reagan said that what he wanted was a country in which everybody could get anybody had to have the right to get rich well if that's our value we can do that but the fact is we are sacrificing all kinds of things when we look at the overall impact we're not necessarily you know the happiest country by a long shot now we're not you know we're actually somewhere in the middle when it comes to life satisfaction but we have more depressed people per capita than than any of these other countries and we're certainly not the healthiest because we've got you know the worst life expectancy worst in mortality worst more term maternal mortality almost any health outcome you can measure us us is near the bottom or at the bottom of the heap we are now saying are issues and you're saying a bunch of this is because of overwork and specifically the fact that americans don't take think cations because they're not encouraged to and sometimes they're not even allowed even allowed to not start just occasions i mean i think it's a whole lifestyle for me vacations and summer is somewhat symbolic it has an importance in itself because we know that a great deal of coronary disease and other things could be prevented by people taking vacations but it's just part of it vacations is it is a symbol of the idea that we need time for life and let us work with you know here's a cynical part of me americans watch what is it for six hours of television a day on average if they had more time when they just watch more t v well initially that they might initially they might but then they might go out and start to do something because what  we find about t v viewing in the world if we look at the stats we find that in countries there's a correlation between the annual working hours and t v viewing basically the more hours people work in a given year the more they watch television that's sort of the united helder into it is if the japanese and americans have a long as working hours they watch the most t v the norwegians in the dutch have the shortest working hours they watch the least t v and the numbers are you know they're not perfect on the way up but but they're they're really going to push back at you about whether this is just about access to television and i know what you're saying it's about exhaustion t v is the perfect activity i do it myself is the first perfect perfect activity to do when you're worn out all you've got to do is sit there be entertainment the couch and click this thing if you have time and you're not exhausted then you have time to go out and spend time with other people make you know do things go to the theatre do you know things that take take a little bit of energy participate in the community read a book all those kind of things take more energy commercials right and what those commercials which most people find in many cases find the most fascinating things on t v because they're fast paced they spend way more money to air commercials and shows oh yeah so those whole q and then you get into the thing i got to have this i got to have this that that that encourages the spending habits and the spending habits then pushes you into more debt and into more work so it's inside as i watch more t v you know if you can somehow get off work and spend treadmill work watch spanned work span go into debt work watch spend cetera et cetera if you can somehow find a way to get off that and you got a chance well and and we start people on that  mount of money spent advertising to children is now roughly fifteen times as much as it was as it was as recently as nineteen what was it nine hundred ninety and you know of marketing targeting kids it's not even illegal in sweden or quebec and i remember reading at one point that it wasn't even legal in one of the earliest legal code the human race ever printed i think it was the  had a death sentence for targeting targeting cares for me while trying to sell things to care well i'm not advocating that but i think we need some i mean we tried to get a rule in the seventies people tried to get a rule that would go through with that law it passed its own law prohibiting the f c c from restricting advertising to children so what we have right now is a law that says you can't restrict dance to kids what yeah how can well because that's where the money and the you know money talks nobody walks the golden rule he has the gold makes the rules and that's what our country's been very kind of commercial media folks went to congress they said they probably said well if you don't let us advertise the children we won't be able to produce any content for children and children want anything to watch oh yeah deprived yeah they're going to suffer miserably like all those poor horrible suffering kids in sweden come back and you know i mean let's get a clue i mean this is now what's what's happening out there kids don't suffer because they can't watch these kind of vats that target them kids suffer from watching too much of the stuff they get obese they you know they get diabetes early age they get all kinds of other issues you raise good point which is that child growing childhood epidemic of obesity i actually think there are a lot of people who are scared about that and i'm wondering if if maybe that's going to be the lever that lets us reignite this conversation  this is an issue this marketing to kids is an issue that actually very much crosses political lines there are a lot of people in the even the religious right and conservatives and stuff then they may be free marketers to the max when it comes to themselves and all of this keep government off my back but when it comes to their kids they really don't like having these marketers target their kids they don't like it when they see that the marketers have conferences were they have speeches about increasing the nag factor and pester power and all the time this is what they talk about it's how we get past the the gate keepers the markers called parents gatekeepers which go what you know brings us back to vacation time because like who wants to go on vacation with kids who have been primed on the nag factor oh yeah yeah and when when we get that's true it's it's always a kind of a joke the family vacation you know with the kids whining in the backseat what are we going to get there and s the truth is that the that family vacations are actually quality bonding experiences for the most part for most people and they are the experiences most likely to be right remembered about the family by children later in life  studies that show this family vacations getting away from the regular routine do help by children they help by parents they actually you know yeah it's not it's not that they're perfect or anything like that but but they're a separation from the every day and a chance a time out and vacations do this for people vacations are wonderful as bonding is they're wonderful as rican layers of romance but they're out of the natural world there's less likelihood that we will appreciate it almost all the famous environmentalist that we can think of and i offer myself my the fact that i'm an avid environmentalist today has to do with the fact that i was a backpacker when i was a kid my dad took me out to the sierra nevada to go backpacking when i when i was very young and from there on same thing with all the other another point in favor of family vacation right thank you very much oh man the time to come and talk with us about it and for africa in this for our famil for our kids my pleasure well there's no present like the time