As the year draws to a close, many workplaces will be preparing to shut down over Christmas, and many businesses will force their employees to take personal annual leave.
Finder.com.au research showed 5.3 million Australians (more than a third of all workers) were forced to use their annual leave over Christmas in 2017 — an average of 8.3 days. Of these workers, 21% had to take more than two weeks off. This represents a large chunk of non-casuals’ four-week allotment.
More recent figures are hard to come by, but given many employees accrued higher leave balances during 2020-21 thanks to COVID, and reducing said balances during quieter periods is why many businesses close, one can assume the practice has only increased.
Is this a problem? And if so, what can we do about it?
Progressive management or corporate control?
Encouraging employees to take leave is not just appropriate, it’s vital.
New research by LinkedIn shows more than 60% of Aussie workers feel burnt out from working too hard in 2022, and the pre-Christmas scramble is a particularly stressful time. We’re all in dire need of a break, and good managers should encourage this so staff are recharged and productive. Too few do — LinkedIn found half of all Aussie workers are “worried” about taking the leave they’re entitled to.
But forcing staff to take most of their allotted leave in December and January can exacerbate burnout by leaving them with little time off from February to November. Some businesses might accept additional unpaid leave for those who have used up their paid entitlements, but this won’t be financially viable for many.
Most managers don’t even respect the Christmas break they force their staff to take. LinkedIn found more than half of Australian workers are contacted about work matters during their holidays. For most businesses, forced Christmas leave is not a means to ensure their staff are well rested, but a cynical ploy to avoid the less-predictable inconvenience of workers having varied and fulfilled external lives throughout the year.
This excessive employer encroachment on workers’ holiday planning diminishes individual autonomy; staff might justifiably want to save some of their leave for other periods that are important to them, like non-Christian religious holidays or important family milestones.
Taking back our free time
One way to ensure workers have flexibility is to reduce the discretion afforded to employers by current laws. Employers are legally able to direct you to take annual leave provided the direction is “reasonable”, unless the employee is covered by an award or enterprise agreement that prohibits such directions (most agreements don’t).
What’s reasonable? The Fair Work Commission will consider factors including prior arrangements and norms, your needs, the business’ needs, and the notice period given. These considerations are pretty fluffy and place no hard limits on the amount of time an employer can direct you to take off. In the right circumstances, an employer could shut down for four weeks in January and zap their staff’s entire leave balances for the year.
To prevent this, the federal government could amend our national employment standards to deem cumulative directions that dictate more than one week, or a quarter of an employee’s yearly leave balance, “unreasonable”. If an employer directs an employee to take any further time off, it should be additional paid leave that doesn’t eat into the employee’s personal entitlements.
In France, if employers want to force employees to take more than one week of leave outside their warmer months (such as over Christmas), they must compensate them with an extra one to two days’ leave. Australia could require similar compensation for dictated leave year-round.
But these technical solutions are downstream of a larger problem.
Australia once mythologised our “laid-back” lifestyle and led the world in putting limits on the working week. But our four-week holiday entitlement has gradually fallen behind and looks pretty stingy compared with many European countries that offer five or six weeks. UK workers, for instance, are entitled to 28 days of annual leave. In Austria, employees get five weeks’ leave for each of their first 25 working years, then six weeks a year thereafter.
Matching these peer nations would ease competing pressures on workers’ limited time off, allowing them to take leave at Christmas and later in the year.
With so many workers limping to the finish line exhausted, we’ve all earned some extra R+R.
Should bosses have the right to force holidays on their staff? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Are enforced holidays for millions of Australians each year:
[A] a good way of preventing burnout, or
[B] just a cynical ploy by the bosses
B – obviously – i always hated being forced to go on hols at the same time as millions of other poor buggers had to do the same – too crowded, too expensive, too stressful
I do nnot think it is as simple as you suggest. Some workplaces do this because they have a slowdown and it makes sense to close almost completely. It also I guess synchronises with the school holidays to a degree, though that might not always be a good thing.
That might be fair enough in may workplaces, but it’s not universally true that a week is a reasonable upper limit. In some industrial workplaces there is a need for a major shut-down of plant for comprehensive maintenance and repairs. This is typically scheduled once a year. While the plant is shut down it is worked on by specialist contractors and there is nothing for much of the regular workforce to do. So, they go on leave for the duration of the shutdown. Not all that unreasonable, really.
It is still reasonable compensate people with a small amount of extra leave to use during the year. If I were told to take 3 weeks off it would g allow a reasonable holiday at another time of year. An extra day for each directed month seems reasonable to me.
A friend worked for a consultancy that shut for 3 weeks over Christmas. He wanted to visit home in the European summer, when family and friends would all be at home. I thought it unfair that he had to save up several years of leave to do that.
I agree. Shutting down for as long as there is no work for the regular employees is reasonable, particularly if this arrangement was known when the employees were taken on; but so is negotiating fair terms for that arrangement. That would of course be a hell of a lot more likely if workers and unions were able to negotiate on equal terms with employers, instead of having the deck stacked heavily against them.
I think everyone knows the answer to “would employees willing accept having the terms of 1/2 to 3/4 of their annual leave entitlement dictated to them, if they had a choice”, without needing to get a union involved to negotiate.
What the workers want does not signify at all so long as the employers can impose on them regardless, which is how things stand generally in Australia these days.
Agree, was very much a fact of work in the past, i.e. more light through to heavy industry that requires regular maintenance breaks, and otherwise a fairly full team to operate.
Nowadays, as the image suggests, workforce has become more white collar and other occupations, but now many personnel are employed casually or on short term contracts with holiday pay (supposedly) included in pay rates.
Meanwhile, there are a heap of disability support workers who find it exceedingly difficult to leave over Christmas or any school holidays at all approved. Funny old world, innit?
When I briefly worked for one of our major universities, they had a Christmas shutdown from December 25 to January 1 that was not subtracted from our annual leave – we had our legislated four weeks in addition to the Christmas shutdown.
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During the period I worked for them, January 2nd fell on a Friday – the university advised us they would extend the shutdown by one day and that annual leave would not be affected.
How do we make that standard practice?
Think of sessional lecturers and tutors in traditional annual 2 semester universities, lucky to have income for 8 months of the year; precludes mortgages and loans etc.