Public ideas
Five weeks annual leave – why not?
Annual leave was first included in some wage agreements in 1906, and two weeks of leave became standard after the end of the Pacific War in 1945. The next significant increment was in 1974, when the Whitlam government introduced four weeks of annual leave.
To express this mathematically, annual leave provisions grew, on average, by 0.06 weeks a year up to 1974. (4 weeks ÷ 68 years). Assuming productivity over the last 50 years has risen at the same rate as in the previous 68 years, we should now be due for a further 3 weeks of annual leave. (0.06 X 50).
Writing in The Conversation economics professor Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne more modestly proposes a one week addition to annual leave: Increasing annual leave to five weeks would cost employers less than you might think.
He goes through the mathematics (it’s pretty simple) and comparisons with other countries, considering not only annual leave but also public holidays.
Of course an extra week’s leave would mean one less week of output per worker. By a crude labour theory of value that would result in a 2.1 percent loss of output, which would have to be paid for by all workers, or by those taking longer leave if it were on an opt-in basis with a corresponding pay cut.
But that overstates its cost in welfare terms. There is a work-leisure trade-off, as Borland explains. Some people – probably most people at some stage of their life – feel a need to earn as much as possible in paid work. In more general terms that means we generally need more flexibility on our workplaces.
Borland also suggests that by the laws of diminishing returns, we aren’t as productive in that 48th week of work as we are in the other 47, which is another reason the cost of an extra week’s leave tends to be overestimated. He could have mentioned that an extra week of leave would make it easier for parents to cover school holidays. Yet another benefit, harder to quantify, is that it may force a behavioural change among those who make themselves indispensable in the workplace – technical specialists and the mid-level bosses. They may have to train others to take their place, and stop overstating their importance.
Are men redundant?
There was a time in Australia when men on the political left would (jokingly) complain that if only women hadn’t won the right to vote, we would have enjoyed a string of left-wing progressive governments.
The crossover point, when women started to show more progressive tendencies than men, was around the turn of this century, and is now quite strongly pronounced in Australia and other “developed” democracies.
Progressive women may therefore reasonably ask if men should be entitled to vote.
This phenomenon is the subject of a discussion between Jerusalem Demass, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Alice Evans, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, who has been studying why some societies are more gender-equal than others: Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?.
The first question they asked, without really resolving it, is whether young men are moving to the right, or young women are moving to the left.
The phenomena they describe do not allow for a neat left-right classification however. Rather, the phenomena are about the dynamics of supply and demand. In times long past, for reasons of economic security and social status, women needed to be married and preferably mothers. That more or less maintained a supply-demand balance. Women now have more options, particularly because they are outpacing men in education. Evans cites research that finds “young men are particularly likely to see advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities”.
She explains that this is why the paternalistic attitudes that characterised men of earlier times (“benevolent sexism” is her term) has given way to men’s resentment at women’s successes, and at women’s imagined privileges (“hostile sexism”). This resentment is amplified in the echo chambers of social media.
A more rigorous account of the same phenomena is in a Conversation article by Amanda Keddle and Josh Roose of Deakin University and Michael Flood of the Queensland University of Technology, summarising research they did for the E-Safety Commissioner, aimed to understand what it is like to be a young man interacting with today’s online world.
Their summary is focussed on young men’s reaction to Andrew Tate. Young men’s views are mixed: no generalizations are possible. It’s informative to follow the link to their complete report which goes into details about how young men shape and express their identity, explore sexuality, and navigate social connections online.
The work described in these two links yields insights into young men’s socialization, in response to the expansion of economic opportunities for women and the development of online interactive media. No doubt there are many similar studies.
Underpinning such studies, be they about young men or young women, is the notion that gender identity is an extremely important aspect of people’s lives. This is in contrast with long-established movements for women’s equality which were much more aimed at gender blindness in most realms of life, apart from those associated with mating and reproduction. A similar phenomenon could be observed in relation to “race”, and even disability.
It would be a useful contribution to knowledge if sociologists could address the question whether heightened consciousness of gender identity is leading to a form of gender apartheid – a society reminiscent of Victorian England, and with characteristic of contemporary societies heavily influenced by conservative sects of Islam. To what extent have concerns with identity displaced concern for equality?