Bloomberg BNA data shows that 39 percent of employers will keep operations open and require some workers to come into work, while a seperate survey of Beyond.com users says that 45% of those folks will spend Labor Day working or looking for work.
Surely the Beyond data isn’t representative of the American population, as people using that service are more likely to be on a job search. But these numbers do call to mind an empirical fact: When it comes to getting paid time off, American workers are far behind their peers in other developed countries.
The above chart from The Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) highlights the differences in legal requirements for paid time off in the developed world. The United States is a major outlier among its developed peers when it comes to mandatory time off, and that ends up effecting poorer workers more than anybody else. According to the CEPR, though 23% of American workers don’t receive paid time off, that number jumps to 49% for the bottom fourth of wage earners.