I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE who's forgotten about vacation. Who hasn't heard a friend bragging about how late he stayed in the office last night or a colleague lamenting the number of unused days off he's racked up?

As a nation, we Americans are among the hardest-working people on earth. A 2001 United Nations report found that we work 49.5 weeks a year—3.5 weeks more than the Japanese, a people who even have a word for working yourself to death: karoshi. Compared with the Europeans, our addiction to the desk is even more profound. We put in 6.5 more weeks of work than the Brits and 12.5 more weeks than the Germans.

Americans' workaholic tendencies have been well documented for years, but a 2005 study called "Vacation Deprivation,"

The average American employee has the fewest paid days off in the world. There's a term for this: vacation deficit disorder.

commissioned by the online travel company Expedia.com, reveals just how far over the top we've really gone. The average American employee has the fewest paid vacation days in the developed world: a scant 12. Canadians have 21, the Brits 23, the Dutch 25, the Germans 27, and the liberty-loving French take the prize, with 39—that's right, nearly eight weeks!—paid vacation days a year.

To make matters worse, the Expedia research found that the average American worker will take only nine of his 12 days of vacation. This means that we gave back 421.5 million paid vacation days last year—and lined the pockets of our employers with some $54 billion.

And there are other crushing statistics. More than a quarter of Americans don't take vacation at all. Of those who do, 19 percent end up canceling or postponing their trips at the last minute because of work. According to a 2004 AFL-CIO study, more than 37 percent of American women making $40,000 or less don't get any paid vacation days, and women across the nation receive an average of two fewer days of vacation a year than men.

"Because of job insecurity, American workers often feel huge pressure to be present in the workplace," says John de Graaf, 59, national coordinator for Take Back Your Time, a Seattle-based advocacy organization devoted to promoting humane work hours. "As the stats show, even if you have the vacation time, you might not take it, for fear of being seen as a slacker and losing your job during the next round of layoffs."

There's a term for this: It's called vacation deficit disorder.

De Graaf, who produced the 1997 PBS documentary Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, which was published as a book in 2001, believes a federal law is the first step to overhauling our nose-to-the-grindstone mentality. "No Americans have a legal right to a vacation. It's entirely up to the employer," he says. By comparison, nearly 100 countries, including almost all industrialized nations, give workers those rights. "You can't even join the European Union without guaranteeing every worker in your country at least four weeks' paid vacation after one year on the job," de Graaf explains.

By law, employers in Norway must give workers 25 paid vacation days a year—of course, that's Scandinavia. But in Italy, Spain, and Romania it's 20, the Republic of Congo 26, Senegal 24, Togo (where's that, right?) 30, Cambodia 18, Mongolia 15, Brazil 20, Argentina 20. Take Back Your Time lobbies for a three-week paid vacation for all American workers.

"A society as rich as ours should have this," says de Graaf, who escapes on mountaineering trips in his free time. "Vacations are essential to physical well-being and mental health. They are our opportunity to slow down, to recreate and regenerate, to nourish our souls."