Did Murdoch have a point? DO we holiday too much?

PERHAPS we shouldn’t take the word of a holidaying, octogenarian, tax-shy Twitter virgin too seriously. Nevertheless, while the sting from Rupert Murdoch’s New Year tweet about Brits taking too much holiday for a “broke country” may have been short-lived, the pain somehow lingers. Oh he may have gaffed, but is there wisdom behind those gnarly tweeting fingers? A hard truth for an over-indulgent nation?
 
The honest answer is... it depends on who you compare us with. 
 
In total, UK employees are entitled by law to 28 days holiday a year, which is relatively generous. Finland, Brazil and France are in the lead with 30. But in a very British piece of chicanery employers are entitled to count all eight public or bank holidays per year towards that total, meaning that much hangs on what’s in an employment contract. 
 
The result is that hard-up or hard-nosed employers can give only 20 days. Others can give 30 or more. About 25 days off plus the eight bank holidays is typical.
 
If the US is chosen as a comparison - Murdoch’s adopted homeland – that’s a lot. Americans typically take 25 days a year off work, including national holidays, but have no legal entitlement to them. This, turn, is somewhat slack compared with China, India, Singapore, Canada and Hong Kong.
 
So, based on Murdoch’s experience of the United States – where he’s lived for many years – we in Britain are generous with our holidays 
 
Murdoch’s specific point was about holidays at Christmas and it is true that in the UK three public holidays are clustered together and many people add in their contractual leave to take at least a week off. Most important, where a bank holiday falls on a weekend - as Christmas Day and New Year’s Day just did - the cushy UK practice is to take a work-day off in lieu straight after. 
 
This would be regarded as unusual in other countries. In, say, France - where there is no Boxing Day public holiday either - if a bank holiday occurs on a weekend, there is no day off in compensation, it’s simply gone, as indeed happened on the 1 May and 8 May public holidays last summer and again on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. In France this year, the week between December 25 and January 1 was a perfectly normal working week, Monday through Friday. 
 
Where the UK is arguably meaner than most is in the total number of public holidays. At just eight, the UK takes the fewest of any nation, according to a survey by the consultancy Mercer (level pegging with Australia and the Netherlands). Cyprus takes 15 public holidays, while Austria and Lithuania enjoy 13; France and the US have 10.
 
It’s as if we Brits are culturally sniffy about collective leisure, let alone “festivals”, but happier with each-to-their-own. 
 
Except, that is, where royalty is concerned. Despite horrifying statistics showing the cost to the already struggling economy, David Cameron declared a bank holiday for the royal wedding last April and there is to be another in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee this June. 
 
Now there is something for Murdoch, a staunch anti-monarchist, to get his teeth into. ·