SHOULD WE HAVE MORE NATIONAL HOLIDAYS IN CANADA AND THE USA?
Should Canada and the USA Socialize more Leisure Time for their Workers, Managers and Entrepreneurs?

INTRODUCTION

What is the purpose of a national economy*? Perhaps, one could say that it is to provide: a) for the defence of the nation-state, b) for the health and education of its inhabitants, c) for the edification, entertainment and happiness of its citizens and d) for the furtherance of the nation-state in its endless competition with other nation-states.

Now these goals are not universally held to be true in all nations but for the purposes here, let us assume they are an acceptable set of answers.

For anyone who was a child in the early 1960s, the future (circa the 21st Century) was viewed as a place where people could work 12 hours a week and still enjoy a rich lifestyle. Today, we do have robots building cars, we have labour saving devices in the home, we have satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, we have space travel and space stations, we have universal, ‘free’ and instant communication (the Internet), we have clones, we have heart transplants, we have quantum teleportation, we have… all the things that were first speculated upon by science and science fiction writers in the 50s and 60s and yet many people in North America are working longer hours. Now why is that?

(*See Essay: What is the Purpose of a National Economy?)

SOCIALIZATION OF RISK

In many developed nations, with the significant exception of the U.S., we socialize the risk of the health of the population—i.e., we provide national medical care for all citizens. Now we know that there are something like 40 million Americans who do not have any health coverage and, for many of them, getting sick means financial ruin and a much higher risk of death or impairment because they can not afford treatment or the most advanced treatment.

There is no nation on the planet that has ever held the power of the U.S. The U.S. is exporting its value system to every corner of the globe either through its legions of trans-national corporations, its cultural hegemony or its mighty armies.

One can not ignore the national priorities of a country like the United States because they set the de facto standard for the rest of the world.

Ask yourself the question: ‘If the U.S. decided to go to a six day work week, what would your leaders do?”

In a relatively small nation-state like Canada, we would be unable to follow an independent course of action. A few years ago, one of Ottawa’s great companies (Newbridge, now owned by Alcatel) lost more than 10% of its value overnight because they closed on a national holiday in Canada when the U.S. was still at work. A few U.S. analysts tried to call the PR department to get an answer to some questions and when they couldn’t get an instant response, rumors started swirling around that Newbridge had gone out of business and then the rush was on to dump the stock. Now major publicly-traded companies in Canada have to keep a skeleton staff on at all times when the U.S. is at work lest it happen to them and, presto, they are forced to sell out to a larger competitor.

SOCIALIZATION OF LEISURE

Now the Europeans have tried to take a middle path and, certainly, they have had more success than Canada could ever have in terms of pursuing their own independent policies with regard to working hours and working conditions. France is famous for shutting down every August and German spa resorts are world-class; they know how to pamper the body.

The Euros do not undertand how North Americans live and why they put up with so few holidays; they call us the ‘Work/Pajama People’. We work all day to come home at night to get immediately into our PJs so we can get to bed so we can get up the next day to do it all over again. Social life? Fun? Hobbies? Art? Play? Being with our Kids? Lifetime Learning? Hanging Out? Other interests? Extended Family? Bosom Buddies? Are you kidding, who has time for any of that?

It seems clear to me that there is no way we could ever have a national economy (in Canada and maybe everywhere) that truly puts the interests of its people first without first having an international agreement to that effect. It would be like the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of the Cold War only it would apply to working hours and conditions—“I (name of country goes here) promise not to work myself and my co-workers to death trying to out compete and out do and out sell you if you (aka the United States of America) promise not to do the same to me.” The only difference this time would be that the doctrine would revolve around a calculus of life instead of the Strangelovian calculus of death that haunted my early childhood and all those who are middle aged today.

At its most primal, the urge to work ourselves to death doesn’t just come from our avarice to buy more stuff. It derives from a deep seated fear that if we don’t, our competitors will eat our lunch. If we don’t work hard, our boss will fire us, our chief competitor will steal our clients, our city and our country will fall behind other nations that we compete with, we will all lose our jobs because there are others out there willing to work even harder than we do and for less money, we won’t be able to provide all the necessities of life and educational opportunities for our children, we won’t be able to pay our bills, our spouses will leave us, …

Think about it for a minute—our primary motivations are greed and fear. And these are hugely powerful forces when it comes to humans. Is this the right way to run our lives—living in fear that we are going to get beaten out and greedy for everything we can grab lest one day we don’t have enough? Many executives I know need a holiday from their holidays. They are so stressed out on a day off that they are unable to relax, gain perspective and come back to work refreshed with new energy and new ideas. If they try to take off a regular work day, it is even worse for them knowing that others are working, clients are calling, problems are cropping up and they are not there to solve them. Sweat pours off them from the stress of not being there.

STANDARDS

National or international standards have always made us wealthier. What’s the purpose of having a fax machine if every fax machine has its own standard and one machine can’t talk to another? What if all the fax machines in your city could talk to each other but not to one in Toronto? What if they could all talk to each other in every city in your nation-state but nowhere else?

Most of us have no idea how important these agreements are—we have standards that affect nearly every part of our global economy: we agree on the time of day (don’t laugh; it wasn’t that long ago, before the acceptance of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), that scheduling am appointment with someone was subject to a great deal of clarification as to which time you were using); the calendar, voltage, spelling, driving (right handed or left handed), signalization (red for stop, green for go), table heights, measurement (length of a centimetre, etc.), temperature scales, operating systems, counter heights, work week, right handed screws, protocols for the telephone, television, fax, tape deck, VCR, IP (Internet Protocol), Browser, Email, DVDs, secure e-documents (basically, by default, Adobe PDFs), right click, left click and so on. English has become the international standard for the Internet, for technology, for business, for politics. Think about the economic advantages that derive from having one common language that everyone speaks. The alternative is Babel and we know what became of them…they couldn’t work together as a team and teamwork is perhaps uniquely important to the survival of the human species.

We might not like some of the standards that we have adopted but their economic benefits are enormous.

Now what if we agreed on a new international standard that people should only work 12 hours a week? Would that be possible to do? No, probably not but it might be possible to, say:

Agree on 12 days a year that would be set aside as universal, internationally sanctioned holiday days—one a month.

That would allow people to have one three day weekend per month and it would be a start in a new direction. Is it possible that better rested people might be more creative and more productive? It certainly is possible and would be worth finding out.

I know that I can not take any time off; I feel guilty if I do. Work ethic is so deeply ingrained in me that if I try to take a day off when other people are working, I feel lousy. I am sure that I am not alone in this—I need Big Brother to impose time off and make it a social goal, then I am fine with it.

Why couldn’t our leaders simply agree to add the 12 new international holiday days to whatever national holidays they already have in their countries whether that is 6, 8, 10 or whatever number of days. Imagine 12 internationally recognized holiday days where everyone got to rest and, maybe, the planet got to rest too. Turn stuff off for 12 days each year.

To start off, why not try to get the National Holidays in Canada and the USA to a minimum of one per calendar month?

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Entrepreneur-In-Residence, School of Management, University of Ottawa, Adjunct Research Professor, School of Architecture, Carleton University, Founder, Ottawa Senatros. (613) 270-9629 or bmfirestone@exploriem.org.

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