The U.S. had the fastest wage growth since 2009 in January. But in many other ways, American workers feel like they are working harder to achieve the same result.

Does today feel a bit like yesterday, and the day before that? Feb. 2 is Groundhog Day. In the 1993 movie of the same name, Phil (Murray) wakes up at 6 a.m. only to find out that his day is actually exactly the same as the day before and the day before that. “I think people place too much emphasis on their careers,” he says. There may be a reason why that resonates with people in 2018. “Americans are doomed to relive the same reality each year: Forfeited vacation time, burnout, less time for loved ones, and negative consequences for health and well-being,” according to a report by the U.S. Travel Association’s Project Time Off.

More than half of Americans (53%) are burned out and overworked, according to this survey of more than 2,000 workers by Staples Advantage, a division of office supplier Staples Inc. US:SPLS “We found that low pay and more hours is burning employees out and it causes up to half of what employees quit,” says Dan Schawbel, founder of WorkplaceTrends.com, a research and advisory service for the human resources industry, who helped create the Staples survey. Even so, year after year, most Americans say they are one paycheck away from the street with no emergency savings for a car repair or emergency room visit.

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One-third of workers don’t take any vacation

But one reason for this exhaustion does not look like it will be changing anytime soon. Some 42% of workers took a vacation last year, according to a separate survey of more than 2,000 American adults released last year by travel site Skift using Google Consumer Surveys. (Nearly 40% only took 10 days or less.) One theory: Roughly one in four workers don’t get any paid vacation from their employers. Many are low-income workers and are the least able to afford to take an unpaid vacation day. Under the The Fair Labor Standards Act, the U.S. is also one of the few developed countries that does not require employers to provide paid time off.

It’s not entirely their fault. Most American workers receive around 10 paid work days a year and six federal holidays, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonprofit left-of-center think tank in Washington, D.C. But based on Bureau of Labor Statistics’ current average weekly earnings, they’re leaving more than $1,300 on the table by only taking half their paid time off. This amounts to more than $52 billion, according to economic researcher Oxford Economics, “All Work, No Pay: The Impact of Forfeited Time Off” — commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association and sponsored by American Express AXP, -0.61%

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Most companies can fire employees for no reason

Another explanation why many workers wake up with the same pained expression as Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” Most U.S. companies have an “employment-at-will” doctrine, meaning they can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, unless they have a written contract, they’re in a labor union or they’re fired because of some kind of discrimination. In fact, only China has a work culture even less vacation-friendly than the U.S. Over 72% of Chinese workers have not taken a paid vacation in the last three years, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency, cited last year by the New York Times.    

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