1y ago

The Green Party wants to increase annual leave to five weeks

www.rnz.co.nz Election 2023: All the latest developments on 16 September

Labour and the Greens are in Māngere for an E Tū election launch, while National was in Karaka this morning. Follow for all the latest election news with RNZ's live blog.

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.

39 comments

All this 'we can't afford it' happened when we went from 3 weeks to 4 weeks annual leave 20 odd years ago.
And when sick leave came in.
And when the weekend came in.
Every improvement to workers' rights gets met with the same outcry. We'd still be in workhouses if we listened to it.
- You typically make those changes when the economy is doing well though, not in the middle of a cost of living crisis.
  I'd certainly like an extra week of annual leave, but cost of living is a far bigger concern to me right now.
  
  Mate, if you're concerned about the cost of living you should be worried about National prepared to dump over $15 billion onto the housing market through tax cuts geared at the upper end, landlord incentives and reintroducing foreign buyers. At the same time they're wanting to put through other changes that will restrict new supply. Prices are going to absolutely explode again.
  I honestly don't know how these types of changes track against the prevailing economic state, and it suspect it doesn't really matter - every rise to the minimum wage, every increase in entitlements gets the same response.
  You could probably go check out the Parliament hansard records from 2007 when annual leave when from 3 weeks to 4 and find the exact same arguments.
  
  Second this - right now we are expecting business to
  significantly increase wages (minimum wage more than doubled while inflation was ~29%
  recover from covid
  build up financial reserves due to significant chance of recession
  add on about an extra 3% in annual wages to cover leave
  invest significantly in sustainability
  while fighting staff shortages.
  Something is going to give

The time is never right. Making change always causes a bit of pain in the short time. That is not a reason to not try and improve our country.
As a business owner I support this.

What would be great if the parties in power put these kind of policies in place when they had the opportunity rather than when the are clearly going to lose the election.

I just want the free dental
- Yeah, I've got nothing bad to say about that particular policy.

Its nice but I don't see why. Do people think we don't get enough holidays here?

While I very much like the idea, I don't think this is a good time to be implementing this at all.
We're on the edge of recession, inflation is out of control, I certainly can't afford to go on holiday anyway. This is something you enact when the economy is actually doing well.
- Best time is now. However I don't see how green would manage this. Are they going to pay companies while we are away ? How's that going to work for non profits ? This just screams bullshit propaganda.
  Would love to see them voted in just for them to turn around and say. Actually that's not feasible. Similar to every other politicians bullshit manifesto.
  
  It would be a cost to bear for the employer, just like the annual leave we currently get.
  
  So you're saying the best time is now, yet also saying its not actually manageable.

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 churning over
  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.
  We aren’t a high productivity country and we produce low value goods.
  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.
  
  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

39 comments