Part time workers are supposed to be treated the same as full time workers with pay & holiday entitlements pro rata. Personal annual leave allowances are fairly straightforward, but what about public Bank Holidays?
To simplify, suppose all part timers work half time in a standard 9 to 5 Monday to Friday office. Suppose also that this year 6 out of 8 public holidays in England fall on a Monday.
It seems fair that, if full time workers get 8 full days holiday, half time workers get 8 half-days.
For Jane, who works half a day every day, this is indeed fair, But it is arguably very unfair on Mary who works all day Monday& Tuesday plus Wednesday morning, & far too generous to Susan who works all day Tuesday & Wednesday plus Thursday morning.
Mary has to use up 4 full days of personal annual leave entitlement just for Bank Holidays. The office is closed, she has no choice but to take a whole day off for which she has only a half-day allowance.
Susan has a day off work anyway on Monday, so she has the equivalent of three extra days of leave to use whenever she likes.
I wonder how employers or managers cope these days. These problems may have diminished somewhat with the growth of 24/7 society & the need for employers to negotiate all sorts of agreements for Bank Holiday entitlements for both full & part time workers, but the problem of principle remains.
Part time workers, though much less common in the 1970s, were nevertheless recognised in the official employment statistics. One small puzzle was that a full time worker was one who worked 30 hours a week or more. In the days when 37 hours was just about the least anyone could hope for, this seemed odd.
The limit was set at 30 to make sure that teachers were counted as full timers because they, somewhat astonishingly, did not have personal contracts which specified hours of work except for time spent in the classroom.
The Thatcher government set about changing all that & the resulting break down in trust & goodwill is one of the main factors which contributed to the gradual lack of sporting activity in state schools, according to one view. Teachers just became less willing to put in the voluntary out of hours effort needed.
Other commentators blame the anti-competitive ideology of left-leaning teachers, or the short-sighted selling off of school playing fields by local authorities facing budget cut backs.
But it must be the case that the scope for school sports has been diminished by those very same pressures which have led us to the current economic problems & the delusion that ever rising prices of real estate is making us all better off. Put that together with the belief that we cannot afford to build over any more of our green & pleasant land but must cram houses into any bit of available space within existing towns, & sport stands no chance in school.
For sporting activities take up a lot of space – a whole cricket field is sufficient for only 13 players at a time. Even rugby, hockey, netball – three sports whose decline the prime minister, rather bizarrely, claimed at PMQs this week, demonstrated that Labour’s policy on school sports had failed – are greedy of space.
Public schools – for which fees of maybe £30,000 a year would alone require a gross income of twice the median wage to finance – are mostly in rural areas & can afford the luxury of space for sport. There is no way that the town comprehensive can afford the same luxury for its 1,000+ pupils.
Links
Bank holidays
PMQs 24 November 2010
Related post
Continuity black hole
Bank holidays
PMQs 24 November 2010
Related post
Continuity black hole
