The Annual Leave Debate: Why Five Weeks Isn't Radical, It's Overdue
There’s been a lot of chatter online lately about unions pushing for five weeks of annual leave instead of the current four. The predictable response has been a mix of enthusiasm from workers and pearl-clutching from certain quarters about how this will “destroy the economy” or make Australia “uncompetitive.”
What strikes me most about this whole discussion is how we’ve been conditioned to think that four weeks is somehow generous, when it hasn’t budged in over fifty years. Think about that for a moment. Half a century. In that time, worker productivity has skyrocketed thanks to technology (hello, DevOps automation and everything else we’ve built), yet our mandated time off has remained frozen in the 1970s. Something doesn’t add up.
The thing that really gets under my skin, though, is the forced shutdown issue that keeps coming up in these discussions. I’ve seen it firsthand in various IT roles over the years – companies mandating that you burn through three weeks of your four-week allocation for their Christmas shutdown. Then when you try to book leave in February for, say, a school holiday trip with your teenager, you’re told “you just had three weeks off!” No, mate, you had three weeks off. I was forced to take it whether I wanted to or not.
Someone online pointed out that they lost 12 days to a forced shutdown – that’s 60% of their annual leave gone without any choice in the matter. And the companies doing this are often the same ones wringing their hands about leave liabilities on their balance sheets. Here’s a radical thought: if you want to shut down your business for an extended period, you should pay for it, not make your employees foot the bill with their already limited leave entitlements.
The bootlicker response to this whole debate genuinely baffles me. Why would anyone argue against more paid time off? It’s like watching someone refuse a pay rise because they’re worried it might upset their boss. There’s this weird cultural thing we have in Australia where overwork is worn as a badge of honour. I’ve worked with people who brag about pulling all-nighters to fix production issues or responding to Slack messages at 11pm like it’s something to be proud of. It’s not. It means we’re being exploited, and we’ve somehow convinced ourselves to be grateful for it.
The comparison to the US always comes up in these discussions – “but Americans only get two weeks!” Yeah, and they also have shocking healthcare, no job security, and a work culture that literally kills people. Setting the bar at “slightly better than the worst developed nation on earth” isn’t exactly aspirational, is it?
Look, I understand that businesses need to remain competitive. I work in IT, and I’ve seen plenty of roles offshored to cheaper markets. But here’s the thing: if your business model only works by squeezing every last drop of productivity from people while giving them minimal time to actually live their lives, then maybe your business model is the problem, not worker entitlements. There’s solid evidence from European countries with six to eight weeks of leave that higher leave entitlements don’t tank economies – they actually tend to correlate with higher productivity because people aren’t burnt out husks by Thursday afternoon.
The reality is that modern work has changed dramatically. Most corporate jobs could function just fine with proper coverage and handover processes. We have the technology and systems to make it work. What we lack is the will to challenge the status quo and demand better.
Five weeks isn’t radical. It’s barely catching up to where we should have been a decade ago. And frankly, it still doesn’t fully address the core issues around forced shutdowns, unpaid overtime, and the expectation that we should all be “always on” thanks to smartphones and remote work capabilities.
The unions are right to push for this. Whether Labor actually has the spine to back them is another question entirely. But the conversation needs to happen, and workers need to stop apologising for wanting a better work-life balance. Nobody on their deathbed wishes they’d spent more time in the office. Well, except maybe those LinkedIn influencers, but they’re a special kind of insufferable.
Supporting this push for five weeks doesn’t make you lazy or entitled. It makes you someone who values their time, their family, and their mental health. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.