Time off for good behaviour !
MERRY CHRISTMAS !
Our builders announced that despite the delays which had been experienced due to adverse weather, they would be stopping work on Friday 18th December and resuming on Monday 4th January. Apparently this is now the ‘industry standard’ and is actually a very clever way of handling the iniquitous ‘statutory holiday entitlement’ which this loony government has granted to employees at the expense not only of employers and small businesses, but of the core of the country’s economy itself.
So if you’ve got to have a “Bank Holiday” to replace Boxing Day if it falls on a Saturday, plus shopping days, hangover days, and – oh yes – Christmas Day itself, then you may as well shove them all into two of the statutory 5.6 weeks (yes, 28 whole days) and declare a shutdown. Most employers now sensibly declare that Bank Holidays (9 days in all) are included in annual holiday entitlement.
So assuming that there are 52 weeks in a year, 5.6 weeks works out at an incredible 10.76% of the years spent ‘on holiday’ or doing nothing. This in an economy which after twelve years of mishandling and incompetence lies in ruins about our feet. Surely it would be more sensible to reduce rather than to increase ‘statutory holiday entitlement’ and perhaps at the same time do away with ‘Statutory Paternity Leave’ and reduce ‘Statutory Maternity leave’ to a period in which an average woman could recover from a normal childbirth.
Now I can hear the 31 million people in full time ‘employment’ rising up and saying that the ‘deserve’ all this time off. Nonsense. You get paid for the work that you do, and that pay is what you ‘deserve’. It’s called ‘wages’ or ‘earnings’. Too many people these days come out of school knowing their “rights” and not their responsibilities.
There’s often resentment expressed at the Self-Employed who appear to be able to live well and to enjoy the fruits of their labours, perhaps more so than employees. That’s because we self-employed work harder. It’s a fact. We work longer hours, take fewer holidays and ‘sickies’, than employees. If I don’t work, we don’t eat. It’s that simple. No-one pays my holidays; no-one pays me if I have a sniffle or even a hangover.
I believe that all of us – employed or self-employed – have a responsibility to the country we live in. If no-one does anything then nothing will be done. And the credo now seems to be ‘ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you’.
But whilst politicians buy votes with longer holidays, statutory handouts, pension and benefit increases, and non-jobs in local government paying huge salaries for meaningless work (what the hell is an outreach adviser anyway?) then the country will remain where they have put it.
On its knees.
