Nearly 1 in 4 US workers go without paid time off

(bostonglobe) - Every summer, coworkers around the country ask each other the same exhilarating question: “Where are you going on vacation?”

But many of them aren’t going anywhere — not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t.

Nearly a quarter of the American private-sector workforce, some 26 million workers, doesn’t get paid time off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — compared with less than one-fifth in the 1990s.The United States is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee paid vacation and one of only 13 countries in the world not to do so, according to the World Policy Analysis Center at the University of California Los Angeles

In this regard, the United States falls in line with India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and a handful of island nations that don’t require employers to offer workers paid time off. France, on the other hand, mandates 30 paid vacation days a year for all workers; Scandinavian countries offer 25. US citizens in Puerto Rico get three weeks off a year.

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Sweden even require employers to pay vacationing workers extra to help with expenses.

In the United States, low-wage earners disproportionately work without paid vacation. Only 49 percent of those in the bottom fourth of earners get p aid time off, compared with 90 percent among the top quarter of earners.