Today, in a sense, our summer holiday ended. We headed back to our normal routines today, about a week after the majority of New Zealanders, although many went back today, too. Summer itself has a long way to go, of course, and there are more public holidays to come.
The thing about the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, as I’ve mentioned before, is that because there are four statutory holidays, it’s easy to get a nice, long break without using up too many annual leave days. In fact, it’s easy to effectively get an extra week of annual leave.
Suppose someone’s last day was December 13 and they went back today. That’s four weeks, and including weekends and holidays, it’s 30 days. However, because of weekends and statutory holidays, someone would only need to use 16 annual leave days. All full-time workers in New Zealand are entitled to four weeks annual leave, so taking annual leave at this time of year means people get four weeks leave now, and still have four days left over. Then, by arranging to take those four days around a stat holiday, it’s possible to leverage time off so that workers can actually have five weeks off. Sweet!
In June of last year, I posted a chart about the amount of annual leave and paid holidays people in various countries get. It shows that things are relatively good in New Zealand; even though there are countries with more time off, there are a lot with far less.
Our next statutory holiday here in Auckland is Anniversary Weekend the end of January.
4 comments:
The next opportunity for a long holiday without taking much leave will be around Easter - I believe ANZAC day is right afterwards, so 3 days leave = 10 days including weekends and stats.
Exactly. And, now that Waitangi Day and Anzac Day are Mondayised when they fall on a weekend, there will be even more opportunities over the years.
Yes, Americans don't know how deprived they are.
That's exactly so, Roger, but none of us really knows any differently than what we, our friends and co-workers experience. It may be galling to think that a worker in another country gets more paid time off, but, really, I don't think it makes that much difference to folks when they know THEY don't get—and won't get—that much time off.
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