From our Swindon Correspondent:
From the FT
Yet there will be nerves at the top of government about how a shake-up of employment rights will be received among low-paid working class voters who backed the Tories in northern “Red Wall” seats in the December 2019 general election.
A change in the calculation of holiday pay could be “a significant monetary loss” for a low-paid worker often forced into overtime to make ends meet, the TUC official said.
One of my personal bugbears is bank holidays, and the demand for more of them. I often find myself trying to get people to just think hard about it, and tell me how it makes people better off. Businesses pay people to produce things. Paid holiday is part of that pay. If a business is forced to give people more holiday they aren’t going to take hit, not in the long-term at least. They’ll just reduce how much people get per hour to adjust for it.
In its starkest form, you have freelancers who get paid significantly more than employees per hour, but they have to pay for all their sick pay, holiday pay, pension and so forth.
Reducing holiday pay won’t have a significant monetary loss. It’ll mean employers pay more when you’re working.
Of course; a worker’s product has a value to the business, and some portion of that value will be paid to the worker, constrained only by supply and demand. The hope that legislation can get a worker paid more than he’s worth is eternal, likewise this worry that cutting back on “paid” benefits might hurt the worker.
You can hold ministers harmless, as by definition they don’t understand anything. But the TUC ought to.
I’m prepared to believe that Bank Holidays were a great Victorian invention, in the era when workers got half a day on Christmas Day and that was it (cf Dickens, that great documentary writer). But today, in the most densely populated area in the developed world* (maybe excluding Greater Tokyo), they make no sense. Just give everyone an extra 7 days holiday entitlement and let them take it when they wish. I won’t be taking mine in May or August, just so’s I can sit in a traffic jam heading for the local attractions.
* central England
Bank holidays if increased come out of total worker compensation. Some countries have many, the UK has few, but adjusted for income level it makes no difference, except for being there being an assault on freedom to take your breaks at a time of your choosing versus letting the government decide for you when you take some of your breaks.
I used to live in Hong Kong, where we revelled in having all the English bank holidays plus all the Chinese bank holidays.
Four-day Christmas, four-day Lunar New Year, four-day Easter, Solar New Year, Spring Festival, Early Autumn Festival, Late Autumn Festival, Dragon Festival, some others I can’t remember, there’s about 14 or so. Most years that’s three 4-day weekends and more than five 3-day weekends.
More bread and circuses please.