Scrap annual leave – take a holiday

It’s that time of year, peak holiday time. Except that no-one wants to admit they are on holiday. Instead, everyone now says they are “on leave” or if the reply emails that I am receiving are anything to go by :“I am on annual leave. Please contact me after August 21” ..

Annual leave? What does that even mean? Sounds to me as though you’ve been finally let out of the army or given a few days off probation even, and are now free to scamper home for a day or two or go Awol. It could even suggest that you’re on sabbatical or taken a year away.

What has happened to holidays? And what’s so wrong with them? You know, good old-fashioned holidays, good for the soul, nourishment of the mind and even better for battered bodies which so many of us are still repairing after three years of lockdown exhaustion. 

Why is it so wrong to announce that you are enjoying yourself, that you have escaped your office – or these days Zoom – inmates and that you have finally made it to the beach or cabin in the mountains or wherever it is you are going?

I first noticed the phrase “annual leave” creeping up in emails – and then speech – over a decade or so ago, mainly in the professional services, and have been tracking its sinister path to ubiquity ever since. Now the phrase has become common parlance and even the most sensible people in the creative industries, who are supposed to be more carefree about these things, have fallen prey to the new puritanism. 

It’s likely origin is the US, where the out of office email sign-offs first started and reflect the more rigid, contractual approach Americans have to holidays. They have far fewer days ‘leave’ than we have in the UK and Europe, so perhaps employees have become more precious about their holidays.

Professor Cary Cooper, organisational psychologist at Manchester University, says that maybe the use of annual leave reflects our tougher economic climate. “When many countries are in recession or experiencing very difficult economic times, people want to show commitment and dedication, and only that they are only taking some entitled leave, with the implication they will be back very soon.”

Cooper adds that “having a good time” implies that employees aren’t taking their work seriously. This is not the image they want to convey, particularly if their job potentially is at risk. “The language that people use in the context of work, tells us a great deal about how secure people feel about their job, and their perception of the state of the financial position of the organisation they work for.”

What’s also odd about the growth of the annual leavers brigade is that it’s come at a time when workers have more freedom from the workplace than ever before with the new found flexibility of working from home or, indeed, from anywhere. 

Yet we must be bold and not let the spirit of holiday die out. Go back in time and before the industrial revolution, most working people didn’t have any holiday at all – apart from holy days of course, the origin of the word.  By the turn of the 18th century, most people had Sunday off but that was about it until in 1871 William Gladstone’s government passed the Bank Holiday Act, which gave workers their first few paid holidays each year. Some skilled workers began to have Saturday afternoon off, and others, such as clerks, began to start having a week’s paid annual holiday. Other employers followed suit, giving a half-day holiday on Saturday. The weekend was born.

By the turn of the 19th century, thousands of holiday makers were taking off to the coast and overseas and, by the beginning of the 20th century, the numbers multiplied fast. By 1937, around 15 million people – about a third of the population – went away for a week or more.

But the right to a week’s holiday was a hard won freedom, and only became law in 1938 with the new Holidays with Pay Act when thousands of manual workers were able to enjoy their first ever holidays by the seaside. 

And it was a hard fought battle. The Trade Union Congress first began campaigning for paid holiday for manual workers in 1911, but it took nearly another three decades for this to be adopted by the government. 

In History Extra, Kathryn Ferry charts the holiday-making revolution in a wonderful article, citing the instance of a Coventry factory worker who took his family on holiday to the seaside in August 1938 for the first time. So thrilled was he by the experience that he wrote to his local newspaper, the Midland Daily Telegraph, to tell them all about his trip, signing himself off simply as “Sunburned.” 

It’s a sweet story yet disguises years of tough campaigning for British workers, particularly manual workers, in the face of strong resistance from employers. Indeed, the government only decided to act after Lord Amulree headed up a parliamentary select committee to consider the issue. After long and tortuous sessions, Amulree made it clear which way the wind was blowing, stating: “Too much mischief has been done in the past by treating workpeople simply as production units instead of human beings.”

Many employers shifted their stance. In the year after the Amulree committee took evidence, 1.25 million employees were granted paid holidays, taking the figure covered by voluntary arrangements up to three million by April 1938. 

Three months later, on 29 July, the Holidays with Pay Act officially became law and millions of manual workers were allowed one week’s holiday for the first time ever. It couldn’t have been better timing: that following August there was a heatwave and Britain’s holiday making soared. Ferry, who has also written the history of the Butlin’s holiday camps, describes the frantic scenes: resort cafes all over the country were packed from morning to night, swimming pools and cafes were besieged. The rail network was at full capacity. Over the bank holiday weekend, 300 excursion trains ran to Blackpool while at Southend an extra 70 trains were laid on to take 80,000 Londoners home on bank holiday Monday. Over that same August bank holiday, Southern Rail ran 240 extra long-distance express trains, 82 of which headed for Europe via the ferry.

Yet there was still a problem for most manual workers. They could take the week off but many of them were not paid because the new law allowed employers to choose whether they wanted to pay workers or not. The government had hoped that employers would pay up, and that they would come up with their own arrangements to do so. No such luck.

It took another two years before paid holiday became law – adding another 11 million workers to those who were paid for a week’s holiday, taking the number of Britons who could take paid time off to 30 million. 

The great British holiday boom had started, triggering an explosion in holiday camps like Butlins, the growth of seaside towns such as Great Yarmouth, Caister, Hastings and Brighton, the expansion of the Youth Hostelling Association, the Workers Travel Association and other holiday related organisations. 

Getting paid to take time off was hard to achieve. So ditch your annual leave and shout out loud that you are going on a summer holiday. It’s much more fun.  

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