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The Star
21-07-2025
- Business
- The Star
The global war on public holidays is too lazy
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.
Los Angeles Times
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Eliminating national holidays is a promising idea. Start with the racist ones
Believe it or not, France has had a form of social security since the 1600s, and its modern system began in earnest in 1910, when the world's life expectancy was just 32 years old. Today the average human makes it to 75 and for the French, it's 83, among the highest in Europe. Great news for French people, bad news for their pensions. Because people are living longer, the math to fund pensions in France is no longer mathing, and now the country's debt is nearly 114% of its GDP. Remember it was just a couple of years ago when protesters set parts of Paris on fire because President Emmanuel Macron proposed raising the age of legal retirement from 62 to 64. Well, now Prime Minister Francois Bayrou has proposed eliminating two national holidays, in an attempt to address the country's debt. In 2023, before Paris was burning, roughly 50,000 people in Denmark gathered outside of Parliament to express their anger over ditching one of the country's national holidays. The roots of Great Prayer Day date all the way back to the 1600s. Eliminating it — with the hopes of increasing production and tax revenue — brought together the unions, opposing political parties and churches in a rare trifecta. That explains why a number of schools and businesses closed for the holiday in 2024 in defiance of the official change. This week, Bayrou proposed eliminating France's Easter Monday and Victory Day holidays, the latter marking the defeat of Nazi Germany. In a Reuters poll, 70% of respondents didn't like the idea, so we'll see if Paris starts burning again. Or maybe citizens will take a cue from the Danes and just not work on those days, even if the government decides to continue business as usual. Here at home, President Trump has also floated the idea of eliminating one of the national holidays. However, because he floated the idea on Juneteenth — via a social media post about 'too many non-working holidays' — I'm going to assume tax revenue wasn't the sole motivation for his comments that day. You know, given his crusade against corporate and government diversity efforts; his refusal to apologize for calling for the death penalty for five innocent boys of color; and his approval of Alligator Alcatraz. However, while I find myself at odds with the president's 2025 remarks about the holiday, I do agree with what he said about Juneteenth when he was president in 2020: 'It's actually an important event, an important time.' Indeed. While the institution of slavery enabled this country to quickly become a global power, studies show the largest economic gains in the history of the country came from slavery's ending — otherwise known as Juneteenth. Two economists have found that the economic payoff from freeing enslaved people was 'bigger than the introduction of railroads, by some estimates, and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the latter half of the 19th century,' according to the University of Chicago. Why? Because the final calculations revealed the cost to enslave people for centuries was far greater than the economic benefit of their freedom. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus 'discovered America,' civilizations had been thriving on this land for millennia. The colonizers introduced slavery to these shores two years before the first 'Thanksgiving' in 1621. That was more than 50 years before King Louis XIV started France's first pension; 60 years before King Christian V approved Great Prayer Day; and 157 years before the 13 colonies declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. Of all the national holidays around the Western world, it would appear Juneteenth is among the most significant historically. Yet it gained federal recognition just four years ago, and it remains vulnerable. The transatlantic slave trade transformed the global economy, but the numbers show it was Juneteenth that lifted America to the top. Which tells you the president's hint at its elimination has little to do with our greatness and everything to do with the worldview of an elected official who was endorsed by the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan. If it does get to the point where we — like France and Denmark — end up seriously considering cutting a holiday, my vote is for Thanksgiving. The retail industry treats it like a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas, and when history retells its origins, it's not a holiday worth protesting to keep. YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
