Mostly, I agree
However, I don't agree with your winter holiday point.

Time off is neither a generous free gift from your employer, nor from the government. It is part of your remuneration package, like pension and NI contributions, interest free loans, subsidised canteens, and whatever else employers may use to entice candidates to work for them. As a worker, I have earned that time, as much as I have earned a salary.

It's commendable that your parents chose to work second jobs in their spare time (although possibly not that they made lifestyle choices that forced such action upon them), but it was still their own hard-earned spare time, not time given to them by their primary employer so that they can go off and work for someone else, like a secondment.

So, it's like buying a cake, and then being told you have to use it as a cushion, because eating it would be wasteful.
(Rastus P Watermelon, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 17:16, 1 reply)

"Time off is neither a generous free gift from your employer, nor from the government. It is part of your remuneration package, like pension and NI contributions, interest free loans, subsidised canteens, and whatever else employers may use to entice candidates to work for them. As a worker, I have earned that time, as much as I have earned a salary."

We're in a recession; with fewer jobs going, and more people needing jobs, things are in favour of the employers when it comes to setting terms. If it weren't for those kind of regulations to set the bare minimum they have to offer, you could very well find yourself choosing between unemployment or 80 hour weeks at £2 an hour with no holiday entitlement, ala the Victorian era.

The kind of free market empowerment for the individual employee only works in the good economic times, when companies are growing and employers are all scrambling after a dwindling pool of available employees. For any other time, you need unions and the government regulation that the unions help to provide.

The only thing we can really debate on is whether a certain amount of paid holiday is something that every working person deserves as a simple matter of human standard of living in this country. Personally, I think it's something worthwhile.
(Musuko, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 17:22, closed)