Vaneza Mari Calderón is a mariachi musician. She plays the guitarron, the large booming bass instrument at the bottom of the sound. Now 35 years old, she’s been a paid musician since she was 13. In addition to gigs, Calderón teaches music: children, college students and incarcerated men and women. And she hasn’t had a paid vacation since 2009.
Calderón is hardly unique. An estimated 28 million Americans don’t have paid vacation and as many as 31% of U.S. employees don’t have paid time off. Among leisure and hospitality workers, like Calderón, only 43% nationwide had access to paid vacation time in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California those workers comprise the state’s fifth largest employment sector; officially, more than 2 million employees.
A federal study by the Obama Administration found that low-wage workers, Hispanics and those with less formal education suffer the greatest disparities in access to paid leave — what Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers called the “benefits gap.”
There are health implications, too: Studies find vacation time benefits the mind and body short term and long term. The stress that comes with a lack of a break from work is associated with heart disease, early aging and Alzheimer’s. Vacation benefits the workplace as well: Employees return more creative and productive.
But at the moment there is no pending legislation — federal or state — to help the people that help others relax.
“We haven’t taken the importance of paid time off for vacations as seriously as we should,” wrote Shawn Fremstad, at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in an email. “We’ve started to do better recently on other forms of paid leave, particularly paid sick days and paid family leave — but paid vacation leave has been pretty much absent from that discussion.”
Since 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research has advocated for paid vacation in the United States and has released three editions of its No-Vacation Nation report, most recently in 2019.
The irony of the lack of support for those entertaining and tending to others isn’t lost on Calderón.
“The work I do is comparable to someone with a 9 to 5, that gets a vacation time,” Calderón says warmly from her home in San Bernardino County. “If I had the ability to take [a vacation], yes I would take it. I would go to a nice, crystal clear, blue beach and take three days and just allow my creative mind to rest.”
In California, leisure and hospitality workers tend to be women of color. Wages vary, though a 2021 Rand report found Hispanic and Black women in the field generally earned less than half the wages paid their counterparts.
Asked about the average week, Calderón initially says she works 10 hours. Then we start to do the math: Besides the gig, there’s travel, preparation and rehearsing — time that would be charged to a client in professions like law. It quickly adds up to more like 40-50 hours. Some days are longer than others. Once a week she drives three hours each way to teach incarcerated men at Tehachapi state prison. By the time she gets home, it’s been a 12 hour day.
Some days are longer for mariachis, like Mother’s Day. She might have as many as six gigs booked, with the first as early as 5 a.m. and the last a little before midnight.
“The next morning, it’s like a bus hit me,” Calderón says.
The gigs take their toll physically. Standing in stiff boots — botines charros — hurts the feet and back. The cumbersome guitarron takes a toll on her back and her fingers.
“We are actually seeing a reduction in the risk for cardiovascular disease the more vacationing a person does.”~ Bryce Hruska, Syracuse University
Then there is the expectation that mariachi imbibe.
“People see the mariachi suit and expect you to drink and expect you to be down to party. But nobody thinks about how we are going to get home,” she notes.
Alcohol makes some musicians sloppy. The quality of musicianship goes down.
“We are in the traje. We are bearers of this beautiful, cultural experience, but you are doing a disservice to the tradition.”
A break isn’t unreasonable. In fact, it would help.
Vacation time has been associated with a lower risk of metabolic syndrome, which has implications for stress, heart disease and diabetes — diseases that disproportionately impact people of color.
“Metabolic syndrome is a collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. If you have more of them, you are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease,” explained Syracuse University’s Bryce Hruska. “This is important because we are actually seeing a reduction in the risk for cardiovascular disease the more vacationing a person does. Because metabolic symptoms are modifiable, it means they can change or be eliminated.”
The American Psychological Association identified multiple significant mental benefits for workers that vacation — including improved mood, decreased stress and increased energy as a result of a trip or break. (Though those benefits diminish within days of returning to work.)
Vacation time benefits us on a cellular level: The genes that tend and repair the body in times of stress and injury, for lack of a better word, relax, a 2016 study found.
Despite the obvious, and the research, not all Americans are taking advantage of vacation time and paid time off.
This year’s survey of American workers by the Pew Research Center revealed less than half of all employees with paid time off, including vacation, use their total vacation time.
Calderón fell into this category the last time she had a job with paid vacation. She was working for a school district between 2008 and 2010 when she was offered a nine month gig in Oregon. When she left, she was paid out the remaining vacation time she hadn’t used.
More than half of all the nation’s leisure and hospitality workers do not have paid vacation time. The nation’s largest percentage of travel and hospitality workers — 14% — are in California, according to a 2021 Rand report, which noted more than 60% of these workers are people of color.
“We’re a very rich nation, but we’re very unequal and deny basic employment benefits to far too many workers who have helped make America rich.”~ Shawn Fremstad, Center for Economic and Policy Research
If we could recognize the benefit of vacation to our health and economy, it seems we could identify who isn’t offered paid vacation and remedy that. I’m not the only one to ponder this. In fact, the Obama Administration’s Council of Economic Advisers asked the same question nearly 10 years ago: “One question is why, if such practices can be beneficial to employers, they have not already been adopted.”
The council’s report plainly states that businesses may be neglecting the long-term benefit of paid vacation time while focusing on concerns over the short-term cost of offering paid vacation (though studies show paid vacation time has no negative impact on businesses) and suggests an opportunity for government to provide guidance and policy. Unfortunately, nothing has improved for workers like Calderón.
While there have been attempts at the local and federal level to foster legislation mandating paid vacation and paid time off, it’s notable that the recent legislative focus on paid time off is actually about family and medical leave — paid time off to attend to immediate emergencies or needs. This would be a good time to remind ourselves that the United States is the only advanced economy that doesn’t offer its people paid vacation. Much of Western Europe, plus Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, do so for their people. ALL of our national neighbors — Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua — offer paid annual leave to their workers.
“We’re a very rich nation, but we’re very unequal and deny basic employment benefits to far too many workers who have helped make America rich,” wrote Fremstad via email. “Many of these same workers are doing essential work that improves the quality of life and well-being of middle and upper-class workers, but don’t get benefits like vacation days that would improve their quality of life and well-being.
“Meanwhile, America is falling behind the rest of the wealthy world when it comes to longevity, and there is a growing class gap in the U.S. when it comes to health and longevity. Of course, benefits like paid vacations are only part of this puzzle, but they matter and contribute to these differences.”
Through a few text messages and phone calls, I was able to quickly identify musicians, artists, delivery drivers, domesticas and hotel workers — folks like Calderón — working full time with no paid time off or vacation to look forward to.
Calderón began studying mariachi at 11. She started to play paying gigs at 13. She was part of the first mariachi trio cast in a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. She has performed with Grammy Award winners and mariachi groups dedicated to inclusion and representation, including Latin Grammy winning Flor de Toloache, New York City’s first all-women mariachi troupe, and Mariachi Arcoiris, the first ensemble of LGBTQ+ inclusive mariachis. She says she is practicing harder for her upcoming gig at an Acapulco restaurant than for her performance at Carnegie Hall.
Nonetheless, her family would ask the question, “Cual es tu plan, Vanezita?”
“I am doing something with my life. It’s not conventional, but I want people to see it,” Calderón says. “My something I am doing is not what you are doing, but it doesn’t make it less.”
A vacation isn’t too much to ask.
“If I had a week to sit at a beach somewhere, I’d feel so happy,” Calderón concludes. “We all deserve a little break.”
