Let's be honest:If you like to take lots of vacation,the United States is not the place to work.Besides a handful of national holidays,the typical American worker gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world--much less than what people in many other countries receive.Only 57% of the US workers use up all of the days they're entitled   to,compared with 89% of workers in  France, a recent research found. So what's going on here?A big reason for the difference is that paid time off is supported by law in many parts of the world.Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries--from Australia to Slovenia to Japan--that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers,according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.Finland, Brazil and France are the champions, guaranteeing six weeks of time off. But employers in the United States have no duty under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access to _ ,government figures show.That makes the US the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't guarantee its workers annual leave,according to a report titled "NoVacation Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group. But the fear of layoffs  and the everfaster pace of work mean many Americans don't want to be absent from the office--anxious that they might look like they're not willing to work hard.Or they worry they won't be able to deal with the backlog  of work waiting for them after a vacation. Working more makes Americans happier than Europeans, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies.That may be because Americans believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with success, wrote Adam OkuliczKozaryn,the study's author and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas."Americans increase their happiness by working, and Europeans increase their happiness through vacation," he found. What does the study in the Journal of Happiness Studies find?
Americans get more happiness from work than Europeans. Americans believe happiness is the most important thing. Europeans believe more hard work leads to success. Europeans do not like taking long vacations.