Annual leave: 'use it or lose it'
Ross Gittins says holidays are a necessity and workers should not cash out old annual leave but rather 'use it or lose it'.
Much as I love my job and enjoy serving you, gentle reader, I can't wait to go on holidays. We're off for a long stay in New Zealand, where I'll be seeing to my entry in the Obese Bushwalker of the Year competition. My new favourite song is: ''I'm happy when I'm hiking, pack upon my back . . . 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 miles a day!'' (Actually 20 miles, tops.)
And yet I fear for the future of annual holidays. Our growing affluence has long been changing the nature of our holidays but now I fear that, in our pursuit of affluence, holidays are losing out.
You've heard, I'm sure, of conspicuous consumption - the consumption that's meant to impress other people with our high social standing and how well we're doing. The more our real incomes have risen over the years, the higher the proportion of those incomes we can afford to devote to conspicuous consumption: the location, size and opulence of our homes; the late-model imported cars we drive; the private schools we send our children to; the clothes we wear; the restaurants we eat in; and so forth.
Illustration: Kerrie Leishman.
But studies by psychologists have found that holidays are a form of inconspicuous consumption - presumably because the people we're trying to impress can't see the holidays we go on. In theory, this is a good thing: we don't compare our holidays with other people's and would simply like the longest holidays we can get.
In practice, however, I fear it means our holidays get squeezed to accommodate spending on things that do impress other people. And that's a pity because other research by psychologists suggests that spending your income on experiences gives you more happiness than spending it on things.
I confess to hankering after the long, lazy summer holidays of my baby boomer youth. Your family would go to some beach or watering hole - a lake in my case - and spend the days going up and down to the water or sprawled around reading. Occasionally you'd go for a walk.
Those holidays seemed to stretch out endlessly. Your parents were there to recharge their batteries and if you ever got bored, that was your problem. You found yourself something to do, never bothering to complain to unsympathetic oldies.
The object was to get away for as long as possible, do as little as possible and spend as little as possible. Fish and chip shops were well patronised and, as a special holiday treat, I was allowed one threepenny ice-cream cone a day.
Whatever happened to those holidays? According to Richard White, a historian at the University of Sydney, those holidays were overtaken by our growing affluence.
In the days when work - even housework - was more likely to involve manual labour, all parents wanted to do on holidays was rest. Fishing was about as strenuous as it got. But now that most work is mental, we're more inclined to want to get outdoors and do something physical - skiing or bushwalking. Notice that the defining characteristic of a holiday remained unchanged: difference. You have to go somewhere different and do something different.
Another force for change was the return of (ever more highly educated) married women to the paid workforce. I never noticed it then but the only person who didn't get much of a holiday in the good old days was Mum.
Once mums were working, they wanted a proper break, too. Hence the attraction of the holiday resort, where meals and housework were part of the package. Now mothers were bringing income into the house, more expensive holidays were more needed and more affordable.
With rising incomes and declining air fares, the airlines put together package deals for holidaying families - although the higher cost meant taking shorter breaks. And with much of the cost arising from the labour of those who provided the many services, it soon became economic to fly to overseas holiday resorts in Bali or Fiji, where labour was cheap.
But I think we've also had a change of attitude towards holidays. Throughout the 20th century, unions fought for and governments delivered ever-longer periods of paid annual leave. From one week we got up to four weeks by the early 1970s.
And there, so long ago, the progress stopped, even though workers in most developed countries - bar workaholic America and Japan - enjoy far more than four weeks. Business started castigating Australians as lazy, saying we needed to knuckle down and produce more.
Combine the trend to shorter, more expensive holidays with the trend to work intensification as staff numbers have been pared down - making it harder to feel able to get away - and you start to see why so many of us are failing to take all our annual leave.
According to Tourism Australia, in its campaign called No Leave, No Life, employees around Australia have stockpiled an estimated 123 million days of untaken leave. Managers, apparently, are the worst offenders.
WorkChoices took the anti-holidays trend to another level, enabling workers to ''cash out'' up to half their four weeks' leave. See how it works? Allow yourself to buy too much stuff on your credit card, then get yourself out of hock by scrimping on holidays.
But that was under the evil WorkChoices. How does it work under Kevin Rudd's more enlightened Fair Work scheme, to take effect in January? Now, by agreement, you can cash out all your accumulated leave bar the last four weeks.
Sorry, but I don't regard that as progress. Government-imposed annual leave aims to allow people the rest they need to keep functioning effectively in their jobs.
Allowing people to sell their holidays to pay their debts is consumerism gone crazy. Far better to stop them accumulating leave in the first place. Use it or lose it.
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
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