Another splendid summer is beginning in the U.S.  However, if you are looking forward to enjoying some long summer weekends away from work you had better keep this information to yourself.  America’s Puritan work ethic combined with a tight economy has made time off a bad word.  So bad, in fact, that employees may be fired for enthusiastically espousing their company’s summer flex schedule. 

Vanessa Williams worked for an economic development agency about 50 miles north of Philadelphia until she reportedly tweeted the following on June 3rd through the company twitter account: "We start summer hours today. That means most of the staff leave at noon, many to hit the links. Do you observe summer hours? What do you do?"

Two extenuating circumstances seem to have ensured her firing.  First, she was a social media specialist at the agency.  Second, the agency is partially funded by taxpayer dollars.  The underlying message is this was bad public relations—sounding suspiciously like a waste of taxpayer dollars—and she should have known better.

But let’s take a closer look.  Flex time is a workplace perk that allows employees to choose their own work hours to some degree.  A common form of this is the condensed work week where employees might complete their required forty hours in four days, then take a three day weekend.  So flex time is not really even time off in the sense of paid time off for hours not worked.  Plus a temporally rigid attitude regarding when work is done (begin at 9, end at 5) seems a bit old fashioned in today’s global, always-connected business environment.

The other key thing to question is why time off is automatically viewed as a financial negative by certain employers, taxpayers or other naysayers.  Research actually suggests the contrary: When productive employees are required to take regular time off their productivity increases rather than decreases.  Harvard researchers Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter drew this conclusion from a four year study of Boston Consulting Group employees, after consultants were forced in some cases to take consistent time off. 

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without a statutory annual paid leave for employees.  In contrast, citizens throughout Europe have legal rights to a minimum of 20 or more paid vacation days a year, not counting their mandated national holidays.  While many U.S. companies do provide paid time off voluntarily, a 2007 report by the Washington D.C. based Center for Economic and Policy Research (the report appropriately titled “No-Vacation Nation”) indicates that close to one in four Americans receive no paid time off from their employer.  A first step to overcoming this nationally ingrained imbalance is the use of the term “summer hours” with impunity.