When two opposing viewpoints about American workers were emailed me in the same day this week I had to wonder: if Americans are working so hard, why isn’t America working?According to a recent article published on popular Web site Alternet, The Vanishing American Vacation (http://alternet.org/workplace/61122/) , compared to people in other developed countries, Americans don’t ask for more vacation time, don’t take all the vacation time their employers give them and continue to work while they are on vacation. It’s common knowledge to most American workers that they receive far less vacation time - in weeks not days - than their foreign counterparts. With the average American receiving two weeks vacation time, not taking it all seems incomprehensible. Unless of course, you’re doing what you love so much that it doesn’t seem like work and therefore you don’t need “vacation”, in which case you’re probably self-employed and the whole concept is mute. (If that’s you, welcome to my world. There’s much to be said for the self-directed integrated work/leisure existence! But that’s a topic for another day.)Simultaneously, Fortune (and countless other American business publications) tell us American workers can’t compete globally unless they work harder. (See “Are Americans Too Lazy?” at http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/22/news/economy/lazy_american_workers.fortune/index.htm) According to the article, “The surprising report of our relative sloth arrives in new research from the United Nation’s International Labor Organization (UNILO) , which looks at working hours around the world. When it comes to what we might call hard work, meaning the proportion of workers who put in more than 48 hours a week, America is near the bottom of the heap. About 18% of our employed people work that much. That’s a higher proportion than in a few other developed countries like Norway, the Netherlands, and even Japan. But it’s actually lower than in Switzerland and Britain, and way lower than in developing countries like Mexico and Thailand. It’s drastically lower than in what may be the world’s two hardest-working countries, South Korea and Peru, where the proportions are about 50%. “So with the average Brit worker receiving 20 or more days off a year (in France it’s a government-mandated 30), are they really working more in total, or simply just logging more hours per week? Yes, an obvious disconnect here may be that vacation stats are mostly reported for salaried (white collar) workers while the other UNILO data is from among all workers, a huge proportion of which are hourly (blue collar). But I suspect there’s more to it.As my Mexican in-laws would corroborate, Americans have forgotten how to work to live. Instead, we’ve been conditioned to live to work. This breeds an entire society valuing material acquisitions and accomplishments over quality of life, direct experience, and relationships. This inbalance has clearly and successfully fueled the capitalist juggernaut that is America. Yet we may not only have sold our souls for a bigger house and the latest fashion, we’ve also become inefficient. In short, the fruits of our labors don’t carry the impact they should.