The Green Party has announced that it wants to increase annual leave to five weeks.
Co-leader Marama Davidson told a crowd at a E Tū election launch in Māngere today that it would provide organisations with plenty of notice and ensure the full five weeks is available for everyone by the end of 2025.
This wouldn’t make NZ an unusual outlier globally, though perhaps it would be in this hemisphere - and that could be an attractive aspect as we continue to lose talent to Australia.
I’d like to see them carve out an exception for businesses that opt for a 32-hour 4-day week - either one works towards a better work-life balance and a 4-day week is a lot more personal days than just one week extra. Providing an exception for 4-day week businesses would avoid slowing uptake of the 4-day model for businesses that can make it work. The question is, how to balance the exception and leave changes for non-full-time employees?
Can NZ afford it? How many businesses are too fragile from the recent years of challenging operation. I suspect many can afford this, and that some have been pocketing the rewards of improved revenues in this inflationary environment without readily passing on those rewards. There could be more businesses struggling than we’d hope, that are too fragile from the challenges of recent years to wear the new costs.
Then again, maybe some negative impact is worthwhile for the improvement to the portion of the workforce that lacks the negotiating position to get such a deal - some executives and upper management certainly do enjoy such arrangements, including reduced days on massive salaries.
As an employee I like it.
All this ‘we can’t afford it’ happened when we went from 3 weeks to 4 weeks annual leave 20 odd years ago.
And when sick leave came in.
And when the weekend came in.
Every improvement to workers’ rights gets met with the same outcry. We’d still be in workhouses if we listened to it.
The time is never right. Making change always causes a bit of pain in the short time. That is not a reason to not try and improve our country.
As a business owner I support this.
What would be great if the parties in power put these kind of policies in place when they had the opportunity rather than when the are clearly going to lose the election.
I just want the free dental
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tourism churning over
Tourism is one of our lowest productive sectors and has been for over a decade. Paul Callaghan points this out in this video:
“More tourism, [the] poorer you get” “We have no idea what productivity is. The French do and they don’t seem to work at all.”
https://youtu.be/OhCAyIllnXY?t=466
Working more hours doesn’t mean we’re being more productive.
We aren’t a high productivity country and we produce low value goods.
This isn’t entirely correct. We actually do produce high quality, high value items, they just aren’t things that you’d typically think of. I recommend watching the video I posted.
Some very good points!
In New Zealand, there is a strong bias for more hours = more productivity, and this isn’t even remotely true.
That’s a huge part of why we have 8 hour days/40 hour weeks/paid break times/etc. It’s less about workers’ rights, and more about folks being more productive when not overworked.
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Its nice but I don’t see why. Do people think we don’t get enough holidays here?
