Monday Monday

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The man after whom Invercargill is named wouldn’t have approved of Mondayising holidays like Anzac and Waitangi days. Otago Superintendent William Cargill had no truck with those work-shy migrants who were resisting ‘‘the good old Scottish rule’’ that it took 10 hours to constitute a day’s legal work, thank you very much. Many of the workers arriving in the colony, he would sometimes say, had showed up with an exaggerated expectation of larger wages and shorter hours than back home ‘‘making them in reality mere drones’’.

Times change. They changed right under William Cargill, because enough of those drones were really skilled labourers, sorely needed by the colony, and they were able to pressure private employers to force him to back down.

It’s not such a dreadful thing, in itself, that 10-hour working days are still hardly unheard of. But it is an unhappy fact that too often this is not the result of wellrewarded people willingly putting in that extra effort while still keeping their lives in balance.

Nowadays, workers and employers reach contracts, within boundaries set by lawmakers. These include 11 statutory holidays, albeit with unequal status. On most, if the day falls on a weekend, the holiday entitlement transfers to Monday. But if the morning of Anzac Day or Waitangi Day dawns on a Saturday or Sunday, the notion of a day off disappears in a puff of legislative indifference. It doesn’t happen often but it was a double-whammy miss-out last year and people were not best pleased.

With coalition partner and Unitedfuture leader Peter Dunne now supporting the Mondayising of Anzac Day and Waitangi Day, National has found itself pressured to fall in line or find itself outvoted.

We should be clear, however, that the case for Mondayising the holidays is, essentially, that we like our 11 extra days off and don’t want any taken from us. It is not that the status quo denies us the opportunity to commemorate these two hugely significant aspects of our history.

The sombre, sincere Anzac Day dawn services will still be marked on April 25, regardless of where in the week that falls and, in substantially smaller numbers, Waitangi Day will be marked on the date the Treaty was first signed, February 6.

This doesn’t mean that wanting our holidays is anything we should be abashed about. The cost to employers is substantially budgeted for already. New Zealand workers are flogged fairly hard in their hours of work, compared with most of the countries we liken ourselves to. Australia Mondayises its holidays and we need to be aware that even small differences like that do linger in the back of people’s consciousnesses when they are deciding the better place to live.

The Tourism Industry Association supports the change not only on the expectable grounds that domestic tourism gets a wee boost from long weekends, but also because, in the words of chief executive Tim Cossar, ‘‘in these challenging economic times we all need a break; but it’s getting harder to take time off work’’.

Gerry Brownlee says Mondayising the holidays would cheapen them. It wouldn’t. We wouldn’t presume to speak for the original Waitangi signatories, but anyone who assumes the New Zealanders who served their country abroad would have preferred to be commemorated entirely by ceremony would be sorely underestimating the considerable evidence of their fondness for occasional enjoyment of rest and recreation. They, we suggest, would have something to say to Mr Brownlee on the subject of who’s being cheap.