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.
I cant agree with it.
We aren’t a high productivity country and we produce low value goods. Forcing us to copy countries that make their money stripping and mining their country (lot looking at any Australia or anythinf), or had hundreds of years of investment and development isn’t a productive step forward.
Get our businesses back on their feet, tourism churning over and education/health back, get our country developed in a sustainable way, get our population up and then start trying to copy everyone else.
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.
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.
Had a look - I feel like you cherry picked your facts.
6:20 - low per capita gdp, 80% of oecd average per caputa
7.20 - low value goods, except F&P and that pales to most of the competition
Just after yours- low R&D and lack if investment.
Edit: right on tourism being about 30% less productive than country average. On the other hand you can’t change skill sets and business investment in a day, so getting these back would get something back while we transfer and upskill