Take Your Summer Vacation

            Vacation season is in full swing. With summer finally arrived, thoughts are turning to spending time with family, friends, or just by ourselves doing nothing but resting and experiencing the world around us. Vacation is a time of renewal.

            Even if you are not traveling to a distant place, just having the chance to settle in at home and do things you love, or nothing at all, can be rejuvenating.

            As you know, I negotiate collective bargaining agreements for a living. There are certain parts of an agreement that are vitally important. An obvious, though often overlooked, provision is the grievance procedure that allows workers to assert their rights in the workplace.

            Interestingly, when Marvin Miller organized the Major League Baseball Players Union in the 1960s, the first provision he demanded before any other was a grievance procedure. Everything else in that brilliant contract arose out of the grievance procedure.

            But I digress. Back to vacation.

            Many employees view vacation as something that is nice to have, but often those employees fail or refuse to take their time off. Lots of employees leave vacation days on the table at the end of the year claiming that they were just too busy to get away from their jobs.

            I’ve been working for a long time, and I have been helping workers for a long time. Trust me when I tell you this: you are not that important. The company will survive without you for a week while you go camping.

            And guess what – you are going to be a more valuable worker when you come back from vacation.

            In fact it surprises me that more companies do not mandate that employees take their allotted time off. Employers do not grant you vacation time because it is good for you. They grant you vacation time because it is good for them. If it wasn’t good for them, they wouldn’t give it to you.

            You vacation time allows you to clear your headspace of the daily muck that clutters it when you are at work. Vacation allows you to gain perspective about who you are and how you fit into your job. Distance allows you to think about new ways of doing things and handling people at work.

            If you read while on vacation, new ideas will begin to percolate in your mind that you will inevitably bring into your relationships at work and at home.

            And spending time with family or friends will give you ample opportunity to reconnect with the people you love so that you can feel good about your place in the world. Bringing that fuller, more confident self into the workplace will pay dividends for you and for the company.

            I try to get away every quarter now. And I remember when I got married nearly thirty years ago, I promised my wife that we would take a family vacation every year, no matter what. And we did it through illnesses, job losses, college expenses, and even Covid.

            I am proud that we have taken our time to decompress and reconnect. It has made me a better lawyer, husband, father, and friend.

            So take your vacation this summer. The world awaits you.