Free Republic

As soon as he awakes, Brian Porrell checks his e-mail, sometimes firing off a message before he gets out of bed. He makes calls during his commute to the Waltham staffing firm WinterWyman, spends 10 to 12 hours at the office and out visiting clients, and keeps his phone by his side at night, checking work e-mails while he watches sports on TV. Like many workers today, Porrell, 30, is on the job wherever he is — and he doesn’t count out-of-office exchanges in his 50-plus hour week. The millennial generation, the first to grow up with smartphones in their...

College-educated and gainfully employed 36-year-old Eriko Sekiguchi should be a sought-after friend or date, planning nights on the town and faraway resort vacations. But she works in Japan, a nation where workaholic habits die hard. Often toiling 14 hours a day for a major trading company, including early morning meetings and after-hours “settai,” or networking with clients, she used just eight of her 20 paid vacation days last year. Six of those days were for being sick. […] The government wants to change all that. Legislation that will be submitted during the parliamentary session that began Jan. 26 aims to...

Take a holiday, companies tell worried American workaholics By Harry Mount in New York (Filed: 21/08/2006) Americans, who are already the hardest workers in the Western world, are taking fewer holidays than they have done for almost 30 years, a survey says. In a country where most employees only get two weeks off a year plus 10 public holidays, many people are now so ambitious or so terrified of losing their jobs that they have to be forced to take their meagre allowance. According to the Conference Board, a private research group, 40 per cent of American workers are taking...