taldennz

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.

A biennial workplace wellness survey by Southern Cross Health Society and BusinessNZ showed the average rate of absence was 5.5 days per employee over the course of 2022.

It compared to a range of 4.2 and 4.7 days between 2012 and 2020, and was the highest on record since the survey began in 2012.

...

Southern Cross chief executive Nick Astwick said Covid and the then mandatory seven-day isolation was a factor in the higher absences.

"But we also believe as we've moved the minimum leave entitlement from five days to 10 days, that's also contributed to an increase of leave," Astwick said.

"Some of the workforce - we don't know how much - but some of the workforce see the 10 days as an entitlement and so we were expecting to see an increase, and we have," Astwick said.

Though another thing to consider is that, at least in my jobs, when the 5 days were exhausted, you just ate annual leave days when you were sick - or you just brought the bug into the office.

So the change could be reflecting that 5 days was actually not enough (especially with young children who bring home minor illnesses frequently). The increase in average rates seems quite small given the doubling of the allowance.

There will be abuse, I'm not denying it, but allowing us to use sick-leave instead of annual leave so that we can actually get recreational time off seems a fair enough change.