Is it really June? When did this happen? Tulips, baseball, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day . . . this progression of annual events should have triggered some recognition that spring was passing and summer was fast approaching.

As a manager of staff, the surest sign that the summer season is around the corner is the increase in employee vacation requests. Depending upon how many staff you have, managing the summer vacation schedule can bring any manager to reach for the Tums. The time off calendar for the summer months quickly becomes a complex color-coded Gantt chart. It pretty much starts in May with employees keeping a close eye on the calendar to see what weeks have already been taken by other staff as they dance the dance of waiting as long as possible to request time off but also not wanting to let ‘the good weeks’, or the week they want get taken.

To me, it always seems like this employee or that employee just took a week off, how could they possibly have accrued vacation time to request another week. In contrast, I can’t remember when I last took a week off. Oh yes I can. It was last August. This got me to thinking about just how much vacation time on average American workers take each year. I was surprised with what I discovered.

• By comparison to most every other industrialized country, American worker’s work longer and harder and vacation the least.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we get paid vacation at all. The United States is one of the few industrialized countries where the government doesn’t regulate benefits in the private work sector. i.e.; there is no law that says any company is required to offer paid vacation time.

The following information on this topic is taken from a Vault.com article written by Julie Rosenberg that I found enlightening and worth passing along to our readers.

• Americans work two weeks longer than the work-till-you-drop Japanese, and two months longer than the Germans, who sometimes receive up to 15 weeks paid vacation each year, according to the Hay Group, a human resource consulting firm.

• The methods for determining vacation time in Europe and the U.S. are distinctly different. American employers typically base vacation time on length of service, while vacation time is normally mandated by government agencies in Europe, according to the global human resource consulting firm Hewitt Associates.

• On average, European employees get four weeks of vacation. It would take the typical American employee 15 years or longer to attain the same vacation privileges, says Ann Leeds, a Hewitt consultant who specializes in global benefit practices. And as job-hopping becomes more common, fewer Americans ever qualify for such extended vacations. To add insult to injury (at least for leisure-deprived Americans), employers in certain European countries are required to provide a cash "vacation bonus," equal to one-half to one month's pay.

• According to Hewitt Associates, the country with the most vacation days is Denmark with 31, followed closely by Austria and Finland at 30 days. France and Norway are at 25 days, Germany at 24 days, Belgium, Ireland, the U.K., the Netherlands and Switzerland each at 20 days. Non-European countries measured include Brazil at 22 days, Australia at 20 days and Colombia and New Zealand each at 15 days. The U.S. is second from the bottom with 10 days, tied with both Canada and Japan. Only Mexico, with a piddly six days, offers employees less vacation time.

• American companies mimic each others' vacation policies to remain competitive in the market for top talent, making the standard one to two weeks paid vacation a survival tactic, offered begrudgingly by employers. Thanks to this method, U.S. employees receive an average of 9.6 paid vacation days after one year of service, 11.5 after two years, 13.8 after three years and 16.9 after five years, according to an employee benefits survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• By comparison it must not be overlooked that Europe's industry output is lower when compared with the U.S. -- the European gross domestic product has grown 2.4 percent compared to America's 5 percent, over the past five years – many economists believe their six-week vacation mandate is partly to blame because when governments force businesses to pay workers to be idle beyond what is justified by the businesses' productivity, less wealth is produced, more capital is consumed and the result will be lower job-creation rates, lower real pay, or both.