CR5 Issue 147 August 2017

High Days and…
…Holidays. August has arrived. The radio and
no doubt multiple streaming sites are pumping
out playlists with suitably appropriate songs in
celebration. (Actually, there are at least 29
different songs called simply ‘Holiday’, from
Madonna, Green Day and the Bee Gees to Dizzee
Rascal, Happy Mondays and Vampire Weekend.)
The schools are out and strangely for these
usually rain-lashed shores, we’ve enjoyed for
quite some while now an outbreak of sunshine
and high temperatures that even recall, for
some, the heatwave of 1976. What does this time
mean to you? If you have no children yourself, or
they’ve grown up and actually moved out (more
of a rarity these days), then the traffic may be
a little less during the rush hour but otherwise
it’s probably not a lot of change. For those with
children, especially the younger ones, it can be a
challenge to keep them entertained or get them
to entertain themselves. But for six weeks from
mid-July to early September, every day will be a
holiday for someone.
This is a modern phenomenon. The word
‘Holiday’ is a corruption of the two words ‘Holy
Day’. And many years ago, when we were
literally a God-fearing nation labouring under
the yoke of feudalism, it would take the power
of the Church to bring a halt to the usually
back-breaking toil forced upon us by our Lords
and masters. And freemen, working in either
town or country to support themselves and and/
or their family could hardly spare the time to
down tools.
It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the
18th Century, when vast numbers of people
(including women, children, rural workers and
immigrants) were drawn into the mills and
factories, that the power of those people began
to be harnessed and not simply to make the
wheels of industry turn faster. Finally, gathered
together and with a united cause, workers
began to organise themselves. This wasn’t
welcomed by the mill, pit and factory owners,
who often regarded their workforce as little
more than animals. Denied the seasonal breaks
afforded them when they worked the land, a
common practice began to develop, where the
Monday after payday was ‘skipped’, sometimes
the Tuesday too. So widespread was this that
any attempt to penalise the offenders became
pointless. So rather than challenge it, and under
pressure from outlawed but still influential
trade unions, industry finally regulated it. In 1871
Parliament passed the Bank Holidays Act, giving
England, Ireland and Wales four Bank Holidays -
Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday
in August and Boxing Day, to add to the existing
holidays of Good Friday and Christmas Day.
However, as we left the Victorian era, little
changed. Only senior managers and factory
supervisors were allowed paid leave in addition
to Bank Holidays. In 1911 a now legal Trade Union
Congress started to campaign for paid holidays,
but there was significant resistance from both
industry and the government. By 1936, the ILO
(International Labour Organisation, a multinational
group formed in the aftermath of World
War I that is now part of the United Nations,
and which the UK was a part of) put forward
the proposal that all workers should be entitled
to paid leave of at least six days once they had
been employed for a year. The UK refused
to implement it. Eventually, and again under
pressure, the Holidays with Pay Act was passed
in 1938 which gave a limited number of workers
the right to five days paid holiday, but this fell
far short of the two weeks for all that the unions
had been championing.
And this remained the stance from the UK
government throughout the rest of the 20th
Century. Despite pressure from the ILO, the
United Nations and latterly the European Union,
the powers that be at Westminster
fundamentally opposed enshrining the rights of
workers to paid holidays in law. In the 1970’s the
recommendation from the various international
groups was to move to three weeks holiday,
and that increased to four weeks by the 1980’s.
Britain did nothing. It preferred to let holidays
be sorted by the various industries in collective
bargaining with its employees which of course
led to significant disparities in holiday
entitlements. In 1993 the EU Working Time
Directive stipulated that 4 weeks holiday be the
standard holiday entitlement. The UK abstained
and didn’t implement the ruling, and it was only
five years later that finally Tony Blair’s Labour
government put it into practice.
So now we have four weeks statutory holiday
and 8 Bank Holidays. Except for the selfemployed,
the police, and the armed forces.
Oh, and all the zero hour contractors out there.
But what a fight it’s been to get here. Fought
almost every step of the way by the people we
elect to look after our interests. Is it any wonder
that with all the EU laws about to be repealed
and turned into UK ones, some people are
worried that it’s not our interests that will be
looked out for? Happy holidays everyone, but
don’t take them for granted…
Paul M Ford writes for GrayDorian –
The Writing Bureau.
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