30 November 2010

Katy goes wobbly on Christmas Day public holidays

| johnboy
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[First filed: Nov 23, 2010 @ 9:32]

As we hurtle into the future weekends and public holidays are becoming a mess.

Public servants or sufficiently senior members of large private business can expect not to work on most weekends.

But the leisure activities of the fortunate ones require many other people to be working. Someone has to show them around the prospective investment property, bring them a coffee, and tell them they look great in those cargo pants.

The fortunate ones also like to get bonus days off when a public holiday falls on a weekend. But for a huge chunk of the population days off are something they’re only notionally aware of and extra bonus ones make it hard to pay the rent.

Which means when it’s a really important public day like Christmas, as opposed to the vast majority of made up ones no one really gives a rat’s arse about, we now have a conflict.

Do we want people working on the important Christmas Day to get penalty rates of pay for the hardship? Or those working two days later on the public holiday monday which they would have been working anyway?

The ABC reports that Katy Gallagher is now wrestling with this dilemma. One suspects only the lack of an option that will please everyone is stopping her from leaping for the exit already.

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UPDATE: Ms Gallagher has announced that she’s adding an extra public holiday on Christmas Day and deferring structural reform to be someone else’s problem in six years time.

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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.

georgesgenitals4:24 pm 30 Nov 10

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!

georgesgenitals9:18 pm 23 Nov 10

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.

Mr Gillespie said :

Don’t like working Christmas Day? Let someone else do it.

Good luck filling your Christmas roster without penalty rates, Gillespie.

There’s a kernel of truth amongst your ranting though Gillespie. Public holidays have become a sham. They’re just a day that adds expenses to the bottom line of small business.

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?

Pork Hunt said :

Baby Jesus was born 2010 years ago FFS.
Surely this is not the first time that Xmas day has fallen on a Saturday. Why must the wheel be reinvented all of a sudden so to speak???
Why the f*^k can’t governments get the simple things right.

End rant and wipe spittle off chin. Bex and a lie down maybe…

True it has been this way for years and years and years. The simple answer is some creative scheduling in fairness to the employee. For example when I worked shift all those years ago our boss, with our agreement of course made sure that if we worked a Christmas day on a Saturday or Sunday we also worked the same number of hours on the ‘official’ public holiday. It actually worked out better because you got the triple time for the public holiday plus the weekend penalties for the real holiday. A year like this one where Christmas is a Saturday and boxing day is a Sunday would be a bonanza in penalty rates.

Mr Gillespie6:17 pm 23 Nov 10

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.

Baby Jesus was born 2010 years ago FFS.
Surely this is not the first time that Xmas day has fallen on a Saturday. Why must the wheel be reinvented all of a sudden so to speak???
Why the f*^k can’t governments get the simple things right.

End rant and wipe spittle off chin. Bex and a lie down maybe…

housebound said :

Are they saying that public servants should now be paid NOT to work?

what, like already..? 🙂

also heard some of this debate on the beast yesterday – both sides are pushing for legislation. the option of not gazetting the day itself seems absurd to anyone in emergency services, etc who may not then be rostered on to work the public servant’s day in lieu, so miss out on the holiday bonus while working it anyway… whither fairness?

gazette them both – business should be able to factor into their prices the small costs associated with these salary payments [though of course i don’t own a business…], which then makes it sort of ‘user pays’ – no-one is making you go shopping on boxing day or the days following; and why would you want to, with the cricket on and everything?

Are they saying that public servants should now be paid NOT to work?

Gazetting all four days seems like a pretty clumsy approach. My proposal: make the 25th and 26th public holidays, and the 27th and 28th transferred holidays for those who wouldn’t ordinarily work on the 25th and 26th. This should reduce the double-dipping that employers are probably concerned about, while ensuring that everyone gets two days off or two days of penalty rates over Xmas.

We should really follow New Zealand’s lead and pass an Act of Parliament to cover this stuff. Trying to decide the rules a month before the holiday is just nuts.

I heard this on 666 yesterday morning – “It was rash, suggested too late, etc”

Do you have to actually corner the ‘organ grinder’ himself to get a yes or no answer on anything??

If the opposition were actually in sight of the planet I’d vote for them [breaking a life-time rule!]

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