No vacation nation

Oh yeah... and while we're at it... another reason it's not so hot being a (working) US mom: not enough vacation time.

CNN has a piece on how lame our national vacation policy is, compared with other "advanced" nations.

Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries -- from Australia to Slovenia to Japan -- that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.

Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.

But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don't have access to it, government figures show.

That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled "No-Vacation Nation" by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.

For the record, mandatory (paid) leave is not just good for your mental health. It's a must from a computer security point of view -- it's one tool for detecting fraudulent activities -- the vacationer's backup will be exposed to the vacationer's records and may come across fishy transactions.