Here’s some distasteful news: Fewer people in the U.S. are taking vacations this summer. According to a story by Timothy Egan in the New York Times, “shrinking vacation syndrome” is on the rise throughout the land. From his story: “The Conference Board, a private research group, found that at the start of the summer, 40 percent* 60 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months — the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years. A survey by the Gallup Organization in May based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 1,003 adults found that 43 percent of respondents had no summer vacation plans.” And it’s not all by choice or because of rising gas prices. One of the more shocking stats Egan passes along comes from the Bureau of Labor: About a quarter of American workers in the private sector don’t take vacations because they don’t get any paid vacation time. Not even one day. That’s not just sad. It’s shameful. 

Egan points to one company that’s trying to reverse the trend, PricewaterhouseCoopers. The company, Egan writes, “has taken to shutting down its entire national operation twice a year to ensure that people stop working — for about 10 days over Christmas, and 5 days or so around the Fourth of July.”

“We aren’t doing this to push people out the door,” said Barbara Kraft, a partner at the firm in the human resources office. “But we wanted to create an environment where people could walk away and not worry about missing a meeting, a conference call or 300 e-mails.”

The company tracks vacation time so that when employees fall behind, they are reminded through an electronic nag that they should be getting out of the office more. And posters evoking lazy days away from work were put up in the New York offices. Hint. Hint.

Snip.

Company leaders at PricewaterhouseCoopers said they started their nationwide shutdown because people were not getting their batteries recharged. Now that the entire work force of about 29,000 takes a vacation, company officials say they are seeing positive results.

Cheers to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Let’s hope that other companies in the U.S. start seeing the light, too.

* The New York Times goofed and, since we wrote about this, has since posted a correction to its story: “An article on Sunday about the decline of the traditional summer vacation misstated a finding by the Conference Board, a private research group, on Americans’ vacation plans. At the start of the summer, the board found that 60 percent of consumers — not 40 percent — had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months. Forty percent planned to take a vacation, the lowest percentage in 28 years.”