We should get more legal annual leave.

[Theworried2]

Even though we currently get 5.6 weeks leave as a minimum for full time employees plus weekends, this still means we spend 64% of days in our working lives in work.

Surely to ensure better mental and physical health, this amount should be raised (perhaps closer to the 13 weeks children get at school).
it doesn’t make sense that as soon as you leave education, your free time dramatically reduces.

At the very least, to reduce additional costs for employers, everyone should have a legal minimum weeks (e.g.5 per annum) of unpaid leave if they want it. This shouldn’t just be confined to parents.

if people are properly rested, productivity may rise which could help solve the UK’s productivity puzzle.

I think 20 - 25 days plus Bank Holidays is fine. Some companies as people have said could not operate properly with more weeks ( even if unpaid. ) Work has to be covered.

Try working in the US

I did 4 days a week for a while and it was perfect. 52 Fridays off a year!
I could definitely live with that on a permanent basis.

Oh dear, I hope you haven't been cheating yourself out of holidays for years. Statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks. If you work 5 days, that's 28 days. Employers can take BH from that entitlement, where you get them off as part of the 28 days. Some employers included it as extra.

Depending on the industry you work in, you may even be required to work BH, but you get another day instead. If you work a 5 day week, you have to have 28 days at a minimum, it's a legal requirement.

You and @BodegaSushi right, I've checked. Apologies. It was still a ridiculous argument though, and the fact that you left commuting time out makes it even weaker.

Full time workers are, aside from a few who do a smaller number of longer shifts or other unusual patterns, having to spend the majority of their days in a way that doesn't allow them to do much else other than work. You don't reframe that by spending less time on your phone. The whole post reeked of telling people they just need to change their attitude a bit so they can be more compliant cogs in the capitalist machine.

People also quite clearly do not 'need' to change their mindset. What you mean here is that you would find it convenient for them to do so. It's exactly the same as when posters who don't like wfh say that people need to get back into the office. Nope! People can and do vote with their feet.

Rather than comparing their position to medieval peasants (who did at least get quite a lot of feasting days!) they instead reduce hours, quiet quit, retire early and do all kind of things that don't involve giving themselves a little pep talk so they can carry on not being disruptive. The status quo is quite clearly not working, and no amount of platitudes will change that.

I do think better rested people are more productive. A bit like the four day workweek has been massively successful even proving increasing productivity. So yes OP I agree!

It is quite interesting how many people on the thread have blithely assumed that more hours is more productivity and fewer hours is less productivity. That's a massive generalisation. It really depends. And we know some workers have cut their hours specifically because of the demands placed on them.

I have no particular stake in the game - you are welcome to be a capitalist cog or a free spirit - really doesn’t bother me, but we need to at least have a discussion framed around accurate information :)

the OP posited the concept that implied we were working for 60%+ of our lives conveniently ignoring the weekends and that even when we are working it is a minority of our day

as my figures show we actually work c. 1/5 of our year and only c. 1/3 of waking hours - so what exactly is taking place in the vast majority of our waking hours that means we have no spare time - clearly not work as that is only 1/3

and yes work is hard - that is why we do it for payment and it is why we have weekends and holidays to recuperate…

as a society whether capitalist or communist / socialist - if you want a strong economy (which allows us to support a welfare state and be compassionate to those who are less fortunate) then it needs a society of people who put in the effort, not shirkers who want someone else to always take responsibility / want everything for nothing and someone else can pay… I think there is a degree of needing to tell certain parts of society to grow up and realise that life is not always easy, it is not laid out on a plate for you and you have to work to gain…

no apologies for that - nothing to do with any type of politics - pure simple economics. Covid has not helped, the number of people who were paid to have a long holiday seems to have transformed society into expecting that to continue - it can’t - it was paid for by magic money that was created by the government and which we now need to pay back into the economy…

wfh is great - I have been an advocate for over 20 years and have been doing it that long, but it doesn’t work for every company and it does cause issues - there is also a mixture of approaches from those who undoubtedly are more productive to those who spend more time walking the dog and ignoring the job they are paid to do - there are also many other reasons why it can help to have people in an office either more often or permanently…

we have fantastic working conditions in the UK, so the concept that people should work less and some magic fairy will pay for it is basically nonsense, yes every job is different and there is always room for discussion but no-one is entitled to lots of money and a reducing commitment ;)

Your personal takes on how our working conditions can be described aren't accurate information. If you want a discussion based on facts, that's undermined by making subjective opinions such a central part of your posts.

In the UK, we do indeed have low productivity, and we also don't have enough workers. It doesn't follow that people 'need' to behave in a way that might benefit wider society, even if we could all agree on what that might be. Nor does it matter that you think assessing work as a percentage of

Work frequently doesn't pay, or doesn't pay enough for an individual to feel it justifies the effort. In some cases, ie if the person gets a lot of their income from top up benefits, there's a stick that can be applied, but quite often there simply isn't. The relevance of wfh here isn't whether either of us think it's a good thing or not (like you, I'm an advocate) but the fact that it's a subject where posters often wrongly think their opinion on the choices others make about their work is somehow of importance.

We face big problems at the moment, on that we agree. It's going to take a lot more than telling people to reframe their mindset and work harder to deal with them. And the fact is that the working hours and patterns we have now don't exist because of any evidence basis that this is how we're most productive. People just assume. There's so much more to it than that.

Totally ridiculous. We really are becoming totally workshy

Exactly.
It seems to be " I want time off, so I can go and do.....X", without really thinking through who is staffing X

This Government (and quite frankly, every Government in living memory, not just this one) won't even fund a basic level of staff in places they are supposed to fund (Ambulance service, A&E, Social Care, schools, prisons, courts, CAMHS and adult mental health services, police, etc etc etc).

They are hardly going to start paying out to replace people who are not at work due to this extra annual leave, even in the services they are responsible for, so to suggest any Gvmnt is going to subsidise businesses so their employees can take more holiday, is laughable.

It might not be based on evidence of productivity, but the structure of the economy is a delicate balance and it includes expectations of salaries and hours worked - tied into that is everything else including house prices commodity prices etc - tied in several ways from how much it costs to employ labour to make the commodity to how much a business believes they can charge based on levels of spare cash…

you can’t simply change one aspect without massively affecting all others and simply giving everyone more holiday (or doing less work for the same money / getting a pay rise - all the same economically) will simply push inflation even higher…

I have no disagreement that how it is structured now is not ideal, but it is naive to believe as per the OP that you can simply allow everyone to work less and it will some how magically balance out the same…

and as to my calculations- unless you can show where the maths is wrong, we have no choice but to accept that <1/3 of waking hours is work - so each person could indeed benefit from asking the question as to where they spend the rest of their time - and if c. 1/3 of time on average goes on social media and tv / streaming there is a big answer… for those who want more free time maybe they need to start by looking at where they are spending their time now and taking responsibility for it - yes of course there are edge cases where there are challenges but not for the vast majority of the work force…

In terms of the one third, the problem you have there is getting people to attach any importance to the way you've chosen to present the issue.

If people feel they're working too much and have options, as many do, they absolutely do have a choice to instead frame their thinking another way. Such as how they have to spend most of their time on most of their working days. They don't have to decide they're going to spend less time on the internet rather than less time working or in work related activity, just because you reckon they need to.

I don't think OPs suggestion is necessarily the answer either fwiw, nothing that oversimplified is. But we certainly won't find it by dismissing the lack of evidence regarding productivity as you do here. That actually matters a lot. You talk about things not magically balancing, but that's essentially what we expect to do now. Shockingly enough, it's not working. Yet we continue not only to go in blind, but to pretend we can carry on doing so.

I agree that it is more complex - my figures were simply to balance the record against an implied 60%+ time working which is inaccurate.

however, let’s be realistic -is it possible that those who would agitate the most for more time off might overlap as a group with those where more time off will not make them more productive? The most productive people I have seen tend to be those with a strong work ethic and either work longer hours or more effectively - by either metric they are more productive - that group tends to have a much smaller overlap with those demanding extra time off…

and again being realistic - this was demonstrated through covid - the vast majority of those who worked shorter weeks did not miraculously show that they were as productive or more productive - no, unsurprisingly a large % became very entitled - the government is paying my wage therefore I don’t need to work xyz (quite where they think the government gets its money from us yet to be discovered!)

I am all for shorter weeks / longer holidays, but only where people can demonstrate the benefit first, we had 2+ years in which people demonstrated a country which rapidly declined in desire to work, in customer care and response, in efficiency etc - and now more time off is demanded on the basis that it will deliver something that was not delivered then! And some magic fairy is going to pay for it all… news for society - we are broke and if people want a society which can support those who need supporting, which can provide good health care and education etc (regardless of politics) we are in for a period of needing to work harder not less…

compare our work ethic against the USA, ours is appalling by comparison - they are currently rebuilding their economy…

But salaries are generally much higher in the US.

I think part of the problem we have with productivity is down to the fact that working simply doesn't pay. The cost of living in the UK is very high, wages are too low, and the tax burden is too high.

I think that this particularly affects younger people because the cost of housing is so high. Who wants to spend their life working all hours and not even be able to afford a house? The social contract has been broken, and so it's unsurprising that fewer people are motivated to work.

In terms of productivity, many studies have shown that working fewer hours increases productivity, or at least that increasing hours doesn't improve productivity. However, I don't think that productivity is the most important issue here. More time off increases happiness, improves mental health, and quality of life.

I have friends in France and they have a minimum of 30 days annual leave, plus 11 days national holiday, and they work shorter days. In the UK we seem to have the worst of all worlds. We work long hours for shit pay relative to the cost of living.

What’s this about work taking up 1/3 of waking hours? Rough calculation here is that it’s more like 50% of all waking hours in a normal week. The contracted hours themselves, the commuting, getting ready to go (making and wrapping sandwiches, ironing bloody trousers when I live in jeans otherwise), overtime, unpaid lunch breaks where I may or may not actually be working but certainly cannot relax as I can when the working day is over… And I think that’s conservative. The overtime can be a lot more than what I’ve included above, there are days when I’m travelling and then there is the time spent on just thinking about work.

Thats over a full week. On the working days themselves waking hours not taken up by something work-related are few, and what free time there is often time when I’m tired due to work, thinking about it in some way or both.

Considering we are in a financial crisis I don't think the 'average' person could afford to take extra annual leave (generally more money is spent when you're not working, filling your time, days out/ meals out etc) let alone unpaid leave

So when people have extra holidays, sick leave, carers leave, leave for when pets die, mental health days, maternity/paternity leave, flexible leave, study etc. Who actually does the work?

@WandaWonder there does seem to be an expectation it is others. The shop opening example I used- people who want longer shop hours are never those who ever work evenings and weekends.

Unpaid leave for parents (parental leave) is a legal right. You have to allow them to take it (although not necessarily at the time they request it but it has to be within twelve months of their request).

Sorry @DixonD I should've been clearer, I meant it would be difficult to do what OP is suggesting which is having 13 weeks off as leave (even if it's unpaid) every year.

I like the sound of those companies where you can take as much leave as you want, as long as your work gets done. That would work for me!

However much leave you have though, if you work full time it never eels like enough

Not everyone works in an office, has weekends and bank holidays off and can work from home.

I like the sound of those companies where you can take as much leave as you want, as long as your work gets done. That would work for me!

But once an employer realises that you can get the work done in 3/4 or 4/5 of the time they are paying you for, obviously they are then going to only pay employees for 3/4 or 4/5 of the time....... or give you more work to do to fill the time they are paying you for.

I think it should be a 4 day working week as standard.