Tag: Anzac Day

Public holidays irrelevant to retirees

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The Queen’s coffin leaves Westminster Abbey. Wikimedia cc

I’m afraid to say the one-off public holiday to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II passed me by. This was partly because we are both in isolation after testing positive to Covid.

Also, the concept of a public holiday, when you get paid for not going to work, ceased to be relevant to me about 2005 when I quit my full-time job. As happens in the media and many other organisations, some people are rostered on to work a public holiday. This is paid at double time and a half, compared to ordinary time if taking the day off. This is only so for full-time or part-time employees on an industrial award. Casual workers can take the holiday off, but they don’t get paid.

Public holidays in Australia (there are up to 16 national and State-based public holidays), have their own special act of Parliament. The act decrees at what rate an employee should be paid, if he/she takes the day off or has to work on a public holiday.

Public holidays are controversial in Australia, starting with Australia Day on January 26 and the ongoing debate that it is culturally insensitive to celebrate the day white people invaded the country and engaged in frontier wars. Queens Birthday is another holiday subject to the whims of whatever brand of politician is in power. Some states hold the Queen’s birthday in June, September or October. Ironically, the Queen’s actual birthday was April 21. I expect that in 2023 this holiday will either be gazetted King’s Birthday or perhaps we will celebrate both?

Labor Day was traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in May with union marches and music. But some states and territories moved the date to March, September or October. Only Queensland kept the tradition.

National holidays come in a bunch (two around Christmas and New Year and another two at Easter), despite some 10 million Australians reporting to the Census that they have no religion at all. Christianity decreased by more than 1 million people in the 2021 Census, but is still Australia’s most common religion.  Other religions continue to increase.

Then there is Anzac Day, which is becoming more popular rather than less, given that it mostly commemorates the fallen in WWI. As songwriter Eric Bogle famously said: ‘someday no-one will march there at all’.

Back in the 1990s, when careers and work/life balance were on our minds, we assembled as much annual leave as we could find and embarked upon a nine-week tour of the US and Canada. I was taken around a daily newspaper in Vancouver and the editor, on learning that Australian journalists (then) got six and a half weeks leave a year, pleaded with me not to share that with his staff. Canada, which is less generous than some, pays two weeks a year (if you have been with the employer for a year). This extends to three weeks if you stay for five years and so on. In Australia, the powerful federal Australian Journalists Union negotiated six and a half weeks, which was meant to reward the employee for working unsociable shifts. In the US, workers have no paid federal leave entitlements at all. Yet 77% of employers informally offer leave to their workers, along the lines of the Canadian model.

That still means that 23% of employers in the world’s biggest economy either cannot afford to pay workers who are not working or they don’t much care.

Compare that with some of the Nordic countries. According to whoseoff.com, which ranked countries by the quality of their annual leave, Spain, Austria and Finland emerged as the top three. The latter allows 25 days a year for annual leave and another 11 days for public and religious holidays. Spain offers 39 days a year (and a daily siesta) and 10 public holidays. Austria’s 39 holidays include 25 days’ paid leave and 13 public holidays. Austrians who have worked for the same company for a long time can take as many as 35 days annual leave.

You can see that this is not by any means a level playing field. In Japan the annual leave entitlement is 10 days. Workers who have been employed continuously for at least one and half years are granted one additional day of leave for each year of service to a maximum of 20 days. There are no legal provisions for pay on public holidays, despite Japan having 16 national public holidays. Japan’s leave entitlements may seem niggardly, but ironically employers find it hard to convince salarymen to take holidays. There is a culture of ‘attendeeism’, which could be interpreted as a fear of someone replacing you while you are holidaying in the mountains.

So how does Australia stack up? For each year of service an employee is entitled to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid annual leave. If the employee is a shift-worker, they are entitled to a minimum of 5 weeks of paid annual leave. Every employee is also entitled to 10 to 13 paid public holidays depending on the state and territory. Long service leave, which varies by jurisdiction, is also available to long-standing employees.

In researching this topic (under duress, dear reader), I came across a report based on a Unicef study on maternity leave. As you might have come to suspect, the US has no national scheme for paid maternity leave. At the other end of the scale are Estonia, Austria, Japan and Sweden where women can take up to 88 weeks of paid leave (Estonia),

As The Guardian story says, the UK rates in the bottom third of OECD countries. Australia is ranked second-last. Maternity and paternity leave in this country both fall under parental leave which is 12 months’ unpaid and for which parents can claim 18 weeks leave pay (at the national minimum wage). Only one parent at a time can take unpaid job-protected leave.

State public holidays are a bonus – for example Melbourne Cup Day in Melbourne, Brisbane’s Ekka show holiday and so on. Australian workers are perhaps known, but not exclusively so, for taking a day either side of a public holiday. For example, I’d love to know how many Australians didn’t go to work today, parlaying the mourning for Queen Elizabeth into a four-day weekend. Some people do this officially (taking a day off their holidays). Some just call in sick and hope their boss doesn’t spot them at the footie or the cricket.

As we’ve been told, yesterday’s national day of mourning is a one-off event. I’d have thought most of us would have had our fill with the blanket coverage on TV channels (ongoing). I’m still trying to work out if the bird’s eye view of Westminster Abbey was a camera or a drone. I did so feel for those eight sturdy chaps who carried the Queen’s coffin for what seemed an unreasonably long time. They didn’t waver, even when you read that the lead-lined oak coffin weighed something between 250kg and 317kg.

Meanwhile I struggle to carry a box of tissues from one room to another. I can’t believe we went all this time without getting Covid and now here we are.

Make sure you wash your hands after reading.

 

WWI Pacifists, Conchies and Rejects

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WWI Rejects, Montville Memorial Gates, photo by Bob Wilson

Amidst the salvo of Anzac Day stories, the people least often talked about are those who did not take part in WWI,  either because of a Christian or moral objection, for practical reasons, or because the armed forces rejected them. According to the Australian War Memorial, 33% of men volunteering for the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) in 1914 were rejected on medical/fitness grounds. Enlistment standards were gradually relaxed in ensuing years, allowing many of the rejected men to enlist. Key among these changes was to reduce the minimum height of a recruit from five foot six to five feet.

The World War I rejects don’t get much press at all: the blokes with poor eyesight, bad teeth, flat feet, hernias or some  other physical ailment or disability which ruled them out for active service. But once rejected, they often had to bear the same stigma as the despised ‘Conchies’ or ‘CO’s’ – our unique slang for conscientious objectors. In Australia, CO numbers were estimated at less than one in 30.

Globally, there were around 16,000 conscientious objectors during World War I and their numbers swelled to 60,000 or more in World War II. During the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands sought deferment of the call-up or, in the case of American objectors, fled across the border to Canada.

Despite the early fervour to enlist for World War I, the country on the whole rejected the notion of conscription. PM Billy Hughes took the issue to a plebiscite twice during WWI and each time narrowly lost.

Meanwhile in tiny New Zealand (1914 population 1.1 million), the government simply passed a law and conscripted young men for the war effort. And as at least one controversial account claims, they took a very dim view of men who refused to fight on religious or ethical grounds.

Archibald Baxter, father of New Zealand’s late poet laureate James K Baxter, was one such staunch CO – an absolutist to the last.

His autobiography ‘We Will Not Cease’ makes for startling reading as it sets out the cruelty inflicted by his own countrymen on those who refused to fight. Baxter’s son wrote a poem with the searing lines:

“When I was only semen in a gland

Or less than that, my father hung

From a torture post at Mud Farm

Because he would not kill.” (Pig Island Letters, Oxford U.P.1966).

Baxter Jnr’s poem, which describes his father’s ‘blackened thumbs’ refers to Field Punishment No 1, also the name of a 2014 New Zealand television movie. CO’s were hung up on poles (on the front line), in faux crucifixion pose, in the hope they would somehow recant.

Baxter never did.

The mistreatment of conscientious objectors in New Zealand has come to public attention in recent years, first through a public exhibit, and later by an opera, ‘War Hero,’ based on Archibald Baxter’s book.

Meanwhile back in Australia, for those who desperately wanted to enlist, particularly for World War 1, being found unfit to serve was a cruel blow that caused many men to become social outcasts. Unless employed in some clearly supportable on-land war effort, when these seemingly able-bodied men of a certain age were seen out and about, they were often subject to much derision.

The nearby hinterland hamlet of Montville holds a unique place in World War I history, as explained in a Canberra Times feature by Chris Sheedy, commissioned by the Canberra campus of UNSW.

The Montville War Memorial lists the local men who served with the AIF, but also the ‘Rejects’, the men who wanted to serve, but were classified as unfit.

Sheedy writes that in the celebrations of the homecomings of soldiers during and after WWI, most communities around Australia ignored those who didn’t serve.

“In fact, many shunned the ‘shirkers’ and were divided into segments of those whose family members had served and those who had not.”

The authorities must have foreseen this by developing badges for those who volunteered but were deemed ineligible to enlist, or honourably discharged because of age, injury or illness.

Sheedy notes that many men chose not to volunteer for practical reasons – they had a family to support or a farm or business to run.

Professor Jeffrey Grey from UNSW Canberra cites Robert Menzies as a prominent person who chose not to volunteer. Menzies had two brothers who went to war but the siblings agreed that Robert (a lawyer), would stay because he was more likely to provide for his parents in their old age.

Australian folk singer John Thompson, who has researched and written songs about WWI, describes it as a time when there was indeed a mood in the country among young, single people to ‘do your bit’. Thompson developed a song about Maud Butler, a teenage girl who so wanted to do her bit she dressed up as a soldier and stowed away on a ship. She got caught, but later made several other attempts to enlist.

As Thompson explains in the introduction to the song, Maud scrounged up the various pieces of an army uniform. “But she couldn’t get the (tan) boots and that’s what eventually led to her being discovered.”

Maud climbed arm over arm up an anchor rope to stow away aboard an Australian troop carrier. Historian Victoria Haskins, who researched the story, recounts how Maud gave interviews a few days after her return to Melbourne on Christmas Day, 1915.

Maud told local media that she “had a terrible desire to help in some way, but I was only a girl… I decided to do something for myself.”

While there may have been an initial wave of patriotism and a naïve yen to support the British Empire, volunteer numbers dropped in the latter years of the war.

The Australian War Museum estimates that 420,000 Australians enlisted in WWI, approximately 38.7% of the male population aged between 18 and 44. So despite the enormous peer pressure on young men to enlist, 61.3% of enlistment-age men did not join the war effort, for whatever reason.

Enlistments peaked at 165,912 in 1915 and declined in the ensuing years to just 45,101 in 1917 and 28,883 in 1918, the year the war ended.

Most of the literature about Australia’s involvement in WWI emphasises the 420,000 who enlisted, rather than the 665,000 or so who did not.

Given that a majority of men aged 18 to 44 either did not volunteer or were rejected by the AIF, it seems absurd to perpetuate the myth of the shirker. Those who stayed behind because of family loyalties, businesses, careers, or simply because they felt it wasn’t their fight, did not deserve to be ignored or worse, handed a white feather in the street or have one left in their mailbox. It is shocking to recall that a formal Order of The White Feather was formed to encourage women to pressure family and friends into enlisting.

As the AWM comments: “Some criticised the practice, arguing that ‘idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired.’ ”

It wouldn’t work today.

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Closed for Public Holidays

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Photo of sideshow alley on Ekka Public Holiday by Toni Fish, flickr

As I enter the 14th year of not being anchored to a traditional working life, public holidays have become redundant. At best, they are an opportunity to catch up with family and friends still shackled to the Monday to Friday yoke. At worst, they are days when you get by without the dark chocolate you meant to pick up on the Thursday before Easter weekend.

What is the point of public holidays anyway? They mean little to a retired person, or someone unemployed, on disability, or those who just got bored with work and decided not to go in anymore. We need something more attuned to the Australian work ethic − like turning Tuesday’s Anzac Day, the one day of the year to reflect on the folly of war, into an unofficial four-day weekend.

Our Vanuatu-based research team has been working on a radical proposal. Imoverit Day is ideally suited to individuals who need to take a day off but have run out of sick leave. It is named after the Lithuanian linguist and Latin scholar, Ivan Moverit, whose doctorate ‘An analysis of the third-person singular perfect active subjunctive of moveō,’ is a fairly dry read.

Imoverit days can be taken by individuals at any time, without notice, replacing the seven paid national holidays. Yes, we know, some Federal unions already allow workers ‘personal’ time off (with strings attached). One supposes these award provisions would be axed if Imoverit Day gets past the Senate.

As the pronunciation suggests, Imoverit Day acts like the emergency escape valve on a compressed cylinder. When you’re really stressed, frustrated or angry, you just call the boss and say “Imoverit”.

If you happen to be unemployed or retired, just say the magic word to your spouse (assuming you have not been gazumped). You can get some idea of the mindset by browsing the twitter hashtag #imoverit (with a lower-case i) where people vent about petty things.

The invocation of ‘Imoverit’ immediately triggers one of your seven designated days, permission to disappear without sanction for 24 hours. This would necessitate some tweaking of industrial relations and family laws because, as implied, these individual holidays also absolve individuals of their paternal or maternal responsibilities.

Children who have reached the age of reason (7 or 8 according to canon law), will also be allowed to take Imoverit days. Parents would be allowed to set limits on what said children are allowed to do with their 24-hour escapades.

“Yes you can sleep over at Cory’s but no watching Andrew Bolt, right?”

A great day for loners to be alone

Just think of the benefits of taking a day off randomly. You can go to the supermarket and it won’t be crammed with people laying in for the Siege of Leningrad. Visit a popular national park picnic spot when (most) other people are at work − just you and the brush turkeys. Go to a movie in the middle of the week and have the cinema and the popcorn to yourself.

If you can convince your lover to take an Imoverit Day, laws specify you are not required to explain where you were or what you were doing. This would also be good for the hospitality industry.

Australians would very quickly ‘get’ the concept of Imoverit Day, cunningly planning ahead and parlaying ID’s into long weekends. If, after their unplugged rest day individuals still feel stressed, they can call in sick. We forecast a tremendous improvement in work-related stress. Imoverit Day would help HR teams identify workers who are under extreme stress.

“We’ve noticed you’d taken five ID’s and seven sick days in the last three months, Bob. Is there something going on at work or at home you’d like to tell us about?”

We predict a surge in Imoverit Day applications around the third Wednesday in August, an obscure local holiday. The Royal Queensland Show, also known as the Brisbane Exhibition, has in true Aussie fashion, become The Ekka. On People’s Day, tens of thousands cram on to free trains and buses to attend an over-rated carnival where tradition decrees you will either spread or pick up a late winter virus.

All Brisbane workers get a paid day off for the Ekka, unless they happen to be shift workers or in emergency services. Future generations will read how once, long ago, people were paid extra for working on public holidays (or Sundays). It was called time and a half or double time. Employers hated it, but workers were able to enjoy, albeit briefly, the joys of being paid something close to a living wage.

Public holidays often spill over into school holidays, so workers who plan ahead often parlay their annual leave into extended family holidays. Fine if you live in civilised countries like Austria, Portugal, Australia, Finland, Germany and the UK, which allow workers 28 to 35 days per year.

Australia is, nevertheless, a bit stingy with public holidays. With only seven national public holidays, we are in 10th place behind the likes of Austria, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

We predict Imoverit Day would spread swiftly to other countries, apart from the US. As The Telegraph (UK) reported in 2016, the US is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee workers paid annual leave. Official statistics suggest the average private-sector worker in the US receives 10 days of paid annual leave and six paid public holidays a year. Compare that with China though, where you get five days off after your first year with an employer. After 10 years they give you 10 days off. Yay.

Generous paid holidays, but for how long?

It has to be said that in Australia entitlements to paid leave and penalty rates for working on public holidays has been under attack. Even the concept of Labor Day (originally known as Eight Hour Day) has been diminished by successive Tory governments.

Not that we want to put thoughts in people’s heads, but taking an ID the Tuesday after May Day would give you a four day weekend to celebrate the people who fought so hard to bring us the eight-hour work day.

In Queensland, we’re getting May 1 back as Labor Day, conveniently landing this year on a Monday. A previous State government, which cannot be mentioned for fear it might rise again, shuffled May Day to October. Some States also hold Labor Day in October or March. Conspiracy theorists say this is a psychological ploy to dilute the strength of May Day as an international symbol of worker unity.

Our research chief Little Brother said he was astounded to find that, despite the paucity of workers’ rights in the US, the quest to free the serfs from vassalage started in Chicago in 1886 with the bloody “Haymarket affair”.

Little Brother, who reads Chomsky for recreation, says anyone taking an ID on May Day (a public holiday in 66 countries), should be paid double time. They will, however, be required to turn out for workers’ marches in whatever city or town they live in, wear a red beret, sing The Internationale and spend the rest of the day listening to the likes of 2Pac, Public Enemy, Ani Di Franco, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger and Leon Rosselson.

There are worse ways to spend a day.

Some of you may have noticed I took a day off last week. Here’s an extra read from my website archives, April 2015, long before some of you were subscribers. http://bobwords.com.au/anzac-hard-tack/