The global war on public holidays is too lazy

The Star

21-07-2025

People make their way as they carry their shopping bags during the holiday season in New York City, U.S., December 10, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
WORRIES about fiscal sustainability and tepid economic growth are enticing governments to embrace a simple but controversial step: reduce the number of public holidays so employees produce more.
Yet the economic benefit of doing this is marginal.
There are better ways to boost productivity and the number of hours worked that would neutralise bitter conflicts about how the economic cake is divided.
French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou's plan to scrap two of the country's 11 national holidays amid a budgetary crisis has triggered predictable outrage in a country that prizes leisure and a 35-hour work week.
But he's in good company: Slovakia, which has a relatively generous 14 public holidays, last month said it would reclassify one of these as a working day to plug a hole in the budget. In 2023, Denmark abolished the Great Prayer Day springtime holiday to help pay for rearmament. Economists and business groups in Germany and Finland have mooted similar ideas.
Even US president Donald Trump, an improbable Stakhanovite, posted on Truth Social last month that the United States has 'too many non-working holidays,' which he claimed are costing the country billions of dollars.
The notion that most Americans don't work enough actually seems farfetched to this European: The United States has 11 public holidays, the same as France, yet it doesn't guarantee paid time off, whereas the French are entitled to at least five weeks.
Europeans have long accepted lower per capita output in return for having a better work-life balance.
However, weak growth and lousy demographics have left states without sufficient cash to pay for welfare programmes, threatening this social bargain.
The comparatively low number of hours worked isn't helping.
In Germany – where the economy is set to barely grow for a third year – employees take an average of 31 vacation days a year, plus there are nine or more public holidays, many of which fall between Easter and early June when workers are rarely at the office. My compatriots also now take around 15 paid sickness days on average, compared with 10 in 2015.
We're a long way from economist John Maynard Keynes's prediction that by 2030 his grandchildren would work only 15 hours a week, but I can understand why business leaders say we need to work a bit harder as the large baby-boomer generation retires.
Although politically unpopular, cutting a public holiday is comparatively straightforward in most countries, and the government would collect more in taxes from the increased value generated.
Bayrou estimates France's public finances would benefit to the tune of several billion euros, in part because French employers would pay a levy for the free additional labour they receive.
But sacrificing a couple of public holidays probably doesn't move the needle much in terms of growth. — Bloomberg
Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. The views expressed here are the writer's own.