Category: Public Holidays

Public holidays irrelevant to retirees

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The Queen’s coffin leaves Westminster Abbey. Wikimedia cc

I’m afraid to say the one-off public holiday to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II passed me by. This was partly because we are both in isolation after testing positive to Covid.

Also, the concept of a public holiday, when you get paid for not going to work, ceased to be relevant to me about 2005 when I quit my full-time job. As happens in the media and many other organisations, some people are rostered on to work a public holiday. This is paid at double time and a half, compared to ordinary time if taking the day off. This is only so for full-time or part-time employees on an industrial award. Casual workers can take the holiday off, but they don’t get paid.

Public holidays in Australia (there are up to 16 national and State-based public holidays), have their own special act of Parliament. The act decrees at what rate an employee should be paid, if he/she takes the day off or has to work on a public holiday.

Public holidays are controversial in Australia, starting with Australia Day on January 26 and the ongoing debate that it is culturally insensitive to celebrate the day white people invaded the country and engaged in frontier wars. Queens Birthday is another holiday subject to the whims of whatever brand of politician is in power. Some states hold the Queen’s birthday in June, September or October. Ironically, the Queen’s actual birthday was April 21. I expect that in 2023 this holiday will either be gazetted King’s Birthday or perhaps we will celebrate both?

Labor Day was traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in May with union marches and music. But some states and territories moved the date to March, September or October. Only Queensland kept the tradition.

National holidays come in a bunch (two around Christmas and New Year and another two at Easter), despite some 10 million Australians reporting to the Census that they have no religion at all. Christianity decreased by more than 1 million people in the 2021 Census, but is still Australia’s most common religion.  Other religions continue to increase.

Then there is Anzac Day, which is becoming more popular rather than less, given that it mostly commemorates the fallen in WWI. As songwriter Eric Bogle famously said: ‘someday no-one will march there at all’.

Back in the 1990s, when careers and work/life balance were on our minds, we assembled as much annual leave as we could find and embarked upon a nine-week tour of the US and Canada. I was taken around a daily newspaper in Vancouver and the editor, on learning that Australian journalists (then) got six and a half weeks leave a year, pleaded with me not to share that with his staff. Canada, which is less generous than some, pays two weeks a year (if you have been with the employer for a year). This extends to three weeks if you stay for five years and so on. In Australia, the powerful federal Australian Journalists Union negotiated six and a half weeks, which was meant to reward the employee for working unsociable shifts. In the US, workers have no paid federal leave entitlements at all. Yet 77% of employers informally offer leave to their workers, along the lines of the Canadian model.

That still means that 23% of employers in the world’s biggest economy either cannot afford to pay workers who are not working or they don’t much care.

Compare that with some of the Nordic countries. According to whoseoff.com, which ranked countries by the quality of their annual leave, Spain, Austria and Finland emerged as the top three. The latter allows 25 days a year for annual leave and another 11 days for public and religious holidays. Spain offers 39 days a year (and a daily siesta) and 10 public holidays. Austria’s 39 holidays include 25 days’ paid leave and 13 public holidays. Austrians who have worked for the same company for a long time can take as many as 35 days annual leave.

You can see that this is not by any means a level playing field. In Japan the annual leave entitlement is 10 days. Workers who have been employed continuously for at least one and half years are granted one additional day of leave for each year of service to a maximum of 20 days. There are no legal provisions for pay on public holidays, despite Japan having 16 national public holidays. Japan’s leave entitlements may seem niggardly, but ironically employers find it hard to convince salarymen to take holidays. There is a culture of ‘attendeeism’, which could be interpreted as a fear of someone replacing you while you are holidaying in the mountains.

So how does Australia stack up? For each year of service an employee is entitled to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid annual leave. If the employee is a shift-worker, they are entitled to a minimum of 5 weeks of paid annual leave. Every employee is also entitled to 10 to 13 paid public holidays depending on the state and territory. Long service leave, which varies by jurisdiction, is also available to long-standing employees.

In researching this topic (under duress, dear reader), I came across a report based on a Unicef study on maternity leave. As you might have come to suspect, the US has no national scheme for paid maternity leave. At the other end of the scale are Estonia, Austria, Japan and Sweden where women can take up to 88 weeks of paid leave (Estonia),

As The Guardian story says, the UK rates in the bottom third of OECD countries. Australia is ranked second-last. Maternity and paternity leave in this country both fall under parental leave which is 12 months’ unpaid and for which parents can claim 18 weeks leave pay (at the national minimum wage). Only one parent at a time can take unpaid job-protected leave.

State public holidays are a bonus – for example Melbourne Cup Day in Melbourne, Brisbane’s Ekka show holiday and so on. Australian workers are perhaps known, but not exclusively so, for taking a day either side of a public holiday. For example, I’d love to know how many Australians didn’t go to work today, parlaying the mourning for Queen Elizabeth into a four-day weekend. Some people do this officially (taking a day off their holidays). Some just call in sick and hope their boss doesn’t spot them at the footie or the cricket.

As we’ve been told, yesterday’s national day of mourning is a one-off event. I’d have thought most of us would have had our fill with the blanket coverage on TV channels (ongoing). I’m still trying to work out if the bird’s eye view of Westminster Abbey was a camera or a drone. I did so feel for those eight sturdy chaps who carried the Queen’s coffin for what seemed an unreasonably long time. They didn’t waver, even when you read that the lead-lined oak coffin weighed something between 250kg and 317kg.

Meanwhile I struggle to carry a box of tissues from one room to another. I can’t believe we went all this time without getting Covid and now here we are.

Make sure you wash your hands after reading.

 

February 29 – a most ingenious paradox

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Sasin Tipchar, www.pixabay

Every four years we get to wish our friend (let’s call her Hannah), a very real birthday, as she was born on February 29. Hannah was born in a Leap Year, so officially celebrates her birthday every four years. Leaplings, as they are known, are a rare breed.

There have been only 2,470 Australians born on February 29 over the past 10 years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There are, however, 4.8 million Leaplings world-wide, 205,000 of whom live in the USA.

The chances of being born on February 29 are 1 in 1427. Longer odds might apply to Hannah’s discovery that a fellow Leapling shared her workplace.

Hannah has warmed to the idea over the years, saying it is always a talking point when birthdays are being discussed. In the workplace, there is little chance of avoiding that special day. On her 48th birthday (when in Leapling terms she was only 12), Hannah’s work colleagues approached her deadpan, declaring it was time for ‘the talk’.

There are a few catches to being born on a day that is only recognised every four years. Chief among them is the plight of Frederic, an apprentice pirate in Gilbert & Sullivan’s light opera, The Pirates of Penzance.  In Pirates, G&S, as usual, indulge their penchant for social satire: a man of low social standing is smitten by a middle-class damsel (or vice versa). Someone usually objects to the romance and so the fun ensues.

In this case, Frederic falls for the Pirate King’s daughter Mabel (she reciprocates). Unluckily for Frederic, he was born on February 29. The Pirate King decrees (on a technicality) that Frederic is not old enough to marry anybody and is in fact indentured until he reaches the age of 21 (or in Frederic’s case 84 years).

G&S cut loose on the concept of Leap Year, declaring it “a most ingenious paradox”.

G&S’s copyright expired in the 1980s, so I’m quoting at length the Pirate King’s reasoning (delivered mid-song as a rhyming monologue):

“For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,

Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,

Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,

One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –

You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;

And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,

That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!

I am not the first to observe that by acquiring an extra day every four years, employers are getting our enterprise for a bargain. February 29 is not a public holiday and it matters not if it falls on a weekend (as it does in 2020). The bottom line is, it’s an extra day is squeezed into the calendar, at the expense of working people.

It did not surprise me, then, having made this observation, to discover an attempt in the UK to have February 29 declared a Bank Holiday.

A petition made to the 2015-2017 government argued that the average salaried worker was losing out on £113 pounds ($A233)  on account of being required to work one unpaid day in a calendar year.

The government responded to the petition, signed by 16,856 citizens, saying it had no plans to introduce an additional public holiday. An Impact Assessment for the additional Diamond Jubilee holiday in 2012 revealed that day alone cost the UK economy around £1.2 billion. Moreover, the government said, the extra day actually benefited those (Ed: in the gig economy), paid by the day or the hour.

I found a trove of statistics around February 29, which dates back to1582. It started with Pope Gregory III and the Gregorian calendar. It was calculated that it takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds for the Earth to go around the Sun. This results in an accumulation of ‘quarter days’. The Gregorian calendar added an extra day every four years to counteract this.

As if 29 days in February were not enough, two countries had a stab at adding yet another day. Sweden introduced a February 30 in the early 1700s (by accident), during a period where the country was switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.  The Soviet Union observed February 30 in 1930 and 1931 after introducing a ‘revolutionary calendar’ in 1929. This calendar featured five-day weeks, 30-day months for every working month.

Leaplings share their birthday with celebrities including Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, actor Dennis Farina, big band era singer Dinah Shore, rugby league player Nelson Asofa-Solomona, Australian actor and comedian Frank Woodley and US rapper Ja Rule.

But what you probably really want to know is why women are encouraged to propose to men in a Leap Year.

One version is that Ireland’s St Bridget and St Patrick cooked it up between them in the 5th century. If a woman proposed to a man and he refused, he had to buy her a pair of gloves, so the legend goes.

Other accounts say the tradition started in Scotland, where the unmarried Queen Margaret took St Patrick’s informal arrangement and passed it into law in 1288, giving women the right to propose to men in a Leap Year. Men who refused the proposal in Scotland were ‘fined’, the penalties ranging from a kiss to a silk dress for the jilted woman.

Canadian blogger Omar Ha-Redeye, writing in Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine, doubts this story, observing that as Queen Margaret was only five years old at the time, her influence on matters of State was somewhat suspect.

Nevertheless, the Celtic folklore about Leap Year was readily adopted by Victorian society, who held Leap Year dances, so women could find suitable men to whom they could propose.

Given its romantic potential, I was puzzled to find only one mainstream movie made around the idea of a woman proposing to a man in a Leap Year.

Perhaps nobody has been game since reviewers gave Leap Year (2010) such a bollocking. Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode, is set in Ireland. The opaque plot involves a girl (Amy) travelling abroad to propose to her boyfriend. In so doing, she gets involved with Declan (Goode), a grumpy Irish innkeeper with money problems. The movie is said to be loosely based on the silver screen era hits It Happened One Night and I Know Where I’m Going.  

Empire critic William Thomas made it clear how far short it fell of the romantic sizzle of the latter (starring Clarke Gable and Claudette Colbert).

“Rubbish. Irish eyes will be hard pressed to grimace, let alone smile,” Thomas wrote.

Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film one star out of five, saying it was “offensive, reactionary and patronising”. He said Leap Year (widely accepted as the worst movie made about Ireland), was evidence that: “Hollywood is incapable of seeing the Irish as anything but IRA men or twinkly rural imbeciles”.

Ah yes, but the romantics leapt at Leap Year, shelling out $32.6 million at the box office.

What do critics know, eh?

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Closed for Public Holidays

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Photo of sideshow alley on Ekka Public Holiday by Toni Fish, flickr

As I enter the 14th year of not being anchored to a traditional working life, public holidays have become redundant. At best, they are an opportunity to catch up with family and friends still shackled to the Monday to Friday yoke. At worst, they are days when you get by without the dark chocolate you meant to pick up on the Thursday before Easter weekend.

What is the point of public holidays anyway? They mean little to a retired person, or someone unemployed, on disability, or those who just got bored with work and decided not to go in anymore. We need something more attuned to the Australian work ethic − like turning Tuesday’s Anzac Day, the one day of the year to reflect on the folly of war, into an unofficial four-day weekend.

Our Vanuatu-based research team has been working on a radical proposal. Imoverit Day is ideally suited to individuals who need to take a day off but have run out of sick leave. It is named after the Lithuanian linguist and Latin scholar, Ivan Moverit, whose doctorate ‘An analysis of the third-person singular perfect active subjunctive of moveō,’ is a fairly dry read.

Imoverit days can be taken by individuals at any time, without notice, replacing the seven paid national holidays. Yes, we know, some Federal unions already allow workers ‘personal’ time off (with strings attached). One supposes these award provisions would be axed if Imoverit Day gets past the Senate.

As the pronunciation suggests, Imoverit Day acts like the emergency escape valve on a compressed cylinder. When you’re really stressed, frustrated or angry, you just call the boss and say “Imoverit”.

If you happen to be unemployed or retired, just say the magic word to your spouse (assuming you have not been gazumped). You can get some idea of the mindset by browsing the twitter hashtag #imoverit (with a lower-case i) where people vent about petty things.

The invocation of ‘Imoverit’ immediately triggers one of your seven designated days, permission to disappear without sanction for 24 hours. This would necessitate some tweaking of industrial relations and family laws because, as implied, these individual holidays also absolve individuals of their paternal or maternal responsibilities.

Children who have reached the age of reason (7 or 8 according to canon law), will also be allowed to take Imoverit days. Parents would be allowed to set limits on what said children are allowed to do with their 24-hour escapades.

“Yes you can sleep over at Cory’s but no watching Andrew Bolt, right?”

A great day for loners to be alone

Just think of the benefits of taking a day off randomly. You can go to the supermarket and it won’t be crammed with people laying in for the Siege of Leningrad. Visit a popular national park picnic spot when (most) other people are at work − just you and the brush turkeys. Go to a movie in the middle of the week and have the cinema and the popcorn to yourself.

If you can convince your lover to take an Imoverit Day, laws specify you are not required to explain where you were or what you were doing. This would also be good for the hospitality industry.

Australians would very quickly ‘get’ the concept of Imoverit Day, cunningly planning ahead and parlaying ID’s into long weekends. If, after their unplugged rest day individuals still feel stressed, they can call in sick. We forecast a tremendous improvement in work-related stress. Imoverit Day would help HR teams identify workers who are under extreme stress.

“We’ve noticed you’d taken five ID’s and seven sick days in the last three months, Bob. Is there something going on at work or at home you’d like to tell us about?”

We predict a surge in Imoverit Day applications around the third Wednesday in August, an obscure local holiday. The Royal Queensland Show, also known as the Brisbane Exhibition, has in true Aussie fashion, become The Ekka. On People’s Day, tens of thousands cram on to free trains and buses to attend an over-rated carnival where tradition decrees you will either spread or pick up a late winter virus.

All Brisbane workers get a paid day off for the Ekka, unless they happen to be shift workers or in emergency services. Future generations will read how once, long ago, people were paid extra for working on public holidays (or Sundays). It was called time and a half or double time. Employers hated it, but workers were able to enjoy, albeit briefly, the joys of being paid something close to a living wage.

Public holidays often spill over into school holidays, so workers who plan ahead often parlay their annual leave into extended family holidays. Fine if you live in civilised countries like Austria, Portugal, Australia, Finland, Germany and the UK, which allow workers 28 to 35 days per year.

Australia is, nevertheless, a bit stingy with public holidays. With only seven national public holidays, we are in 10th place behind the likes of Austria, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

We predict Imoverit Day would spread swiftly to other countries, apart from the US. As The Telegraph (UK) reported in 2016, the US is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee workers paid annual leave. Official statistics suggest the average private-sector worker in the US receives 10 days of paid annual leave and six paid public holidays a year. Compare that with China though, where you get five days off after your first year with an employer. After 10 years they give you 10 days off. Yay.

Generous paid holidays, but for how long?

It has to be said that in Australia entitlements to paid leave and penalty rates for working on public holidays has been under attack. Even the concept of Labor Day (originally known as Eight Hour Day) has been diminished by successive Tory governments.

Not that we want to put thoughts in people’s heads, but taking an ID the Tuesday after May Day would give you a four day weekend to celebrate the people who fought so hard to bring us the eight-hour work day.

In Queensland, we’re getting May 1 back as Labor Day, conveniently landing this year on a Monday. A previous State government, which cannot be mentioned for fear it might rise again, shuffled May Day to October. Some States also hold Labor Day in October or March. Conspiracy theorists say this is a psychological ploy to dilute the strength of May Day as an international symbol of worker unity.

Our research chief Little Brother said he was astounded to find that, despite the paucity of workers’ rights in the US, the quest to free the serfs from vassalage started in Chicago in 1886 with the bloody “Haymarket affair”.

Little Brother, who reads Chomsky for recreation, says anyone taking an ID on May Day (a public holiday in 66 countries), should be paid double time. They will, however, be required to turn out for workers’ marches in whatever city or town they live in, wear a red beret, sing The Internationale and spend the rest of the day listening to the likes of 2Pac, Public Enemy, Ani Di Franco, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger and Leon Rosselson.

There are worse ways to spend a day.

Some of you may have noticed I took a day off last week. Here’s an extra read from my website archives, April 2015, long before some of you were subscribers. http://bobwords.com.au/anzac-hard-tack/