Katy goes wobbly on Christmas Day public holidays

Can we get metric minutes, hours, days and weeks, while we are at it?

Baby Jesus?? What the??

And all this time I thought that that day was a celebration of the winter/summer solstice unrelated to religion. Damn my agnostic upbringing!

Now the chamber of commerce are whingeing about people getting a day off on Monday – miserable bastards.

The afore-raised issue of increasing personal leave at the expense of public holidays is a shocking suggestion. The whole point of having a Christmas-New Year shut-down period is to enable people to spend time together as a family (or with their friends) – this playing swapsies with who works when doesn’t help with that at all.

People don’t tend to take enough personal leave as it is so far better to coordinate people all having a day off work together.

The issue of sorting out Saturday/Monday as the holiday is (as mentioned above) to enable emergency service people (and the like) who are working on the Saturday to not be ripped off.

Ok this has been put through now.
The radio didn’t go into detail though.
I take it that it only effects the 25th December itself?

georgesgenitals said :

Mr Gillespie said :

Who gives a shit about baby Jesus? It’s got no relevance to those who are non-religious/non-Christian. Didn’t you know that?

Anyway…..instead of having everyone take holidays all at the same time, why not have a holiday-swapping system where when one takes a holiday, another takes his place, instead of having everything shutting down all at once in December and January with all this “forced leave”. Less inconvenience and less mess that way.

Penalty rates are a sham, a needless drain on the employer. Equal work should mean equal pay, regardless of what hours or what days one works on. Pay rates should be evened out, and the lower wages of “normal” days be increased to make up for the abolished penalty rates of unfavourable hours or days. Don’t like working Christmas Day? Let someone else do it.

So if you aren’t interested in the origin of the holiday, feel free to not celebrate it. For example, I don’t celebrate Ramadan or Hannukah.

Easier said than done!

Govt and most businesses close for the holiday season, so you couldn’t work if you wanted too.

Jim Jones said :

Ah, there’s the christmas spirit: whinging because people are getting paid more.

Wait ’til they find out that Anzac Day falls on Easter Monday next year, and that we, the almighty taxpayers, are being bilked out of yet another holiday!

Ah, there’s the christmas spirit: whinging because people are getting paid more.

Mr_Shab said :

It might be a better idea to just bin the whole sham of public holidays (perhaps with the exception of Christmas and Anzac/Australia day) and add a week to statutory leave (i.e go from four to five weeks a year).

It’d work for business and people would get an extra week’s leave per year. Who’s comin’ with me?

We could go one step further and remove the idea of five day working weeks. Just require all jobs to indicate the expected work times, with penalty rates being paid for work before 8am, after 6pm or in excess of 35 hours in any given 7-day period. Introduce an extra 104 days of paid leave per year to make up for Saturdays and Sundays.

The only public holidays should be ANZAC day and Australia Day, and it should be illegal for an employer to refuse leave to someone who is taking leave during holy days for their notified religion’s annual day of religious observance. Atheists, Agnostics and friends who notify their employer appropriately can count October 13 (or thereabouts) as their day of religious observance 🙂

Schools could fit an extra week into the midyear break by avoiding all the declared public holidays!

What a wonderful world this would be!

Mr Gillespie said :

Who gives a shit about baby Jesus? It’s got no relevance to those who are non-religious/non-Christian. Didn’t you know that?

Anyway…..instead of having everyone take holidays all at the same time, why not have a holiday-swapping system where when one takes a holiday, another takes his place, instead of having everything shutting down all at once in December and January with all this “forced leave”. Less inconvenience and less mess that way.

Penalty rates are a sham, a needless drain on the employer. Equal work should mean equal pay, regardless of what hours or what days one works on. Pay rates should be evened out, and the lower wages of “normal” days be increased to make up for the abolished penalty rates of unfavourable hours or days. Don’t like working Christmas Day? Let someone else do it.

So if you aren’t interested in the origin of the holiday, feel free to not celebrate it. For example, I don’t celebrate Ramadan or Hannukah.

Mr Gillespie said :

Who gives a shit about baby Jesus? It’s got no relevance to those who are non-religious/non-Christian. Didn’t you know that?

Anyway…..instead of having everyone take holidays all at the same time, why not have a holiday-swapping system where when one takes a holiday, another takes his place, instead of having everything shutting down all at once in December and January with all this “forced leave”. Less inconvenience and less mess that way.

Penalty rates are a sham, a needless drain on the employer. Equal work should mean equal pay, regardless of what hours or what days one works on. Pay rates should be evened out, and the lower wages of “normal” days be increased to make up for the abolished penalty rates of unfavourable hours or days. Don’t like working Christmas Day? Let someone else do it.

You really don’t have a clue sometimes, do you Gillespie?
Although I am an atheist, I was merely pointing out that Baby Jesus was born over 2000 years ago but that we still can’t work out what to do when his birthday falls on a Sat or Sun.

I don’t know what you do for a crust but you must let your employer walk all over you when it comes to your rights in the workplace.