Messing with holidays and holiday practices is fraught with peril and unintended consequences.
Halloween
A government-controlled Halloween would be truly scary; especially if employers have to pay for it. Halloween should be changed from the fixed date of October 31 to the fourth Saturday in October, according to one state legislator.
The change would make it easier on working parents and safer for the kids, he claimed. Connecticut must be a state where no parents work on Saturdays and no one drinks then, either. There seem to be more dangerous drivers on Saturday nights than any other time, in my experience; but I’ve been wrong before.
What is it with legislators who seem to think that everyone’s life should be under their control? Creating a new and different holiday would disrupt what little economic stability there is in the work world. Yes, letting a holiday fall on the weekday determined by its calendar date may be variable, messy and inefficient, but so is life. That’s the way your birthday works; and if it was good enough for dear old mom, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be good enough for her kids.
Hard to see how changing the weekday when Halloween is celebrated would help people or create jobs. It would screw things up every year for those who work on Saturday evenings. At least now, under the status quo, they have a chance that they can be home for Halloween when it happens to fall on their days off. Without even checking the goofy calendar cycles, one would expect that almost 29% of the time, Halloween will already fall on a weekend night. The percentage of favorable nights increases to almost 43% if you include Friday, when kids are not required to attend school the next day. Fixing the celebration of Halloween to always fall on the last Saturday night in October would wreak havoc with the wedding industry (no comments about combining terrifying events, please), would create extra scheduling pressure for already-overcrowded weekends and would eliminate one of the few times when kids can go to school and focus on play all day. Finally, all those pre-printed signs and announcements about October 31 Halloween would have to be junked. And all books and documents referencing Halloween as October 31 would require revision. (I seem to recall reading about that process. Wasn’t 1984 a long time ago?) Well, those changes would create a little work, and I’m all for that… working as little as possible, I mean.
Look forward to the day when the government simply legislates that all shall be well and everyone shall thrive in peace and prosperity. Oh, yeah, that’s the standard platform of every politician, isn’t it?
A radio discussion of this changing the date of Halloween story ended with the talk-show hosts agreeing that many of the real issues addressed by CT State Rep. Larson’s proposal could be solved by leaving Halloween’s date alone but making it a half-day of work. With pay for the whole day, of course. Never mind, about the hourly pay and overtime issues involved. You want something? Sure, just pass a law requiring your employer to supply it to you at their cost. Easy-peasy.
Christmas?
The new suggestion by the radio chatterers reminded me of the ancient occasion when we decided that the half-day of work at Rexall corporate headquarters on Christmas eve was substantially wasted time, because everyone spent the morning on holiday parties and gift exchanges. So we decided, in our wisdom, to simply give the whole day off rather than see a half-day “worked” but fraught with other potential issues. Of course, then, people partied the whole day of December 23 rather than the mere half-day of December 24. So we lost a whole day and a half of production versus a half-day.
You live and learn. Unless you are an entertainer with no responsibility or a legislator who can just pass the buck.
E. James (Jim) Brennan is Senior Associate of ERI Economic Research Institute, the premier publisher of interactive pay and living-cost surveys. Semi-retired after over 40 years in HR corporate and consulting roles throughout the U.S. and Canada, he’s pretty much been there done that (articles, books, speeches, seminars, radio/TV, advisory posts, in-trial expert witness stuff, etc.) and will express his opinion on almost anything.
Image courtesy of funnyfact.com
Good thoughts.
Posted by: Stephen Kirkland | 12/01/2011 at 04:54 PM