How much value can compensatory leave create? The expert calculated a labor economy account, why is there a compensatory vacation for tourism | Time | Expert
The Dragon Boat Festival holiday is tomorrow, and after the 3-day holiday, people will have a Sunday off to work, experiencing 6 shifts a week.
On the way to work this morning, the reporter had already heard pedestrians worrying about working six consecutive days next week.
Why is there a compensatory leave? How much economic value can compensatory leave create? To this end, the reporter interviewed Zhang Chuanchuan, Deputy Director and Doctoral Supervisor of the Institute of Labor Economics at Zhejiang University, who is mainly engaged in research in the field of labor and development economics. From the perspective of labor economics, the reporter analyzed the issue of compensatory leave.
Firstly, why is there a compensatory leave?
Since 1999, China has designated the Spring Festival, Labor Day, and National Day as three days off, and the two weekends before and after the Mobile Festival, totaling four days, and the statutory holiday of three days, as a 7-day long vacation. As a result, the "Golden Week" model has emerged. At that time, transportation and tourist attraction reception during the Golden Week were under tremendous pressure, and tickets were even more difficult to obtain.
Since 2007, the Labor Day holiday has been reduced to one day, with the addition of three traditional festivals: Qingming, Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid Autumn Festival. At the same time, compensatory holidays were combined to form two 7-day long holidays for the Spring Festival and National Day, as well as five 3-day small long holidays for New Year's Day, Qingming Festival, May Day, Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid Autumn Festival.
The existence of long holidays is primarily aimed at stimulating consumption. Taking 1999 as an example, when the "Golden Week" model was born, it was during the Southeast Asian financial crisis that affected China. In order to promote domestic tourism and boost the economy with tourism consumption, the "Golden Week" was born.
Zhang Chuanchuan explained that the reason for using compensatory leave to piece together long holidays is determined by the nature of tourism consumption. As a form of cross regional consumption, tourism consumption requires a rigid time investment. Without enough time, it is impossible to truly achieve the goal of stimulating consumption.
In order to make tourism consumption possible, it is necessary to extend the duration of each holiday as much as possible, in order to reduce the proportion of travel time in the overall holiday and give people more time to spend.
Therefore, in the case of a fixed total number of vacation days, it is necessary to take compensatory leave to form more long holidays that can promote consumption.
However, can compensatory leave really create more value?
When taking a day off every year, netizens are most moved by "working hard and saving money to buy a BMW for the boss." Indeed, according to traditional economic data, labor input contributes 40% to economic growth. Taking an extra day off per week brings about an economic loss of about 5.7%.
However, Zhang Chuanchuan emphasized that this economic account cannot be calculated in such a simple way. Because even machines require rest and debugging, especially for humans, it is not enough to work an extra day to improve efficiency.
The arrangement of compensatory leave is not only necessary for ordinary people to readjust their biological clock and reduce production efficiency, but also for enterprises to adjust their production pace due to compensatory leave, especially for factory type enterprises, which is extremely troublesome.
It can be said that both enterprises and employees have been taking long compensatory leave. However, in fact, compensatory leave is not original sin. "Our current contradiction is that the common people want to take a vacation, but there are always people who feel that our economy has not yet developed enough for everyone to have so many luxurious holidays." Zhang Chuanchuan introduced that in fact, China's vacation volume is not only inferior to developed countries, but even lower than that of developing countries such as Brazil and Russia. Among the "BRICS" countries, it is only more than India.
In fact, people's current complaints about compensatory leave are largely aimed at the current situation of "having to continue working after the holiday without rest" and the concern of "not daring to ask the company for annual leave and not daring to take it from those around us".
If a better vacation system can be implemented, people's demand for vacation travel made up by compensatory leave will naturally weaken. The total consumption remains unchanged, but it is evenly distributed throughout the year, which will greatly help economic development and people's holiday happiness.
Furthermore, perhaps we need to adjust our mindset and not always focus on data such as GDP and production efficiency. It should be noted that when society reaches a stage of development, it is necessary to attach importance to the essential needs of residents for spiritual and cultural life, as well as tourism consumption. "At this stage, we need to make vacation and travel a necessary consumption, which can prove that we have truly become rich and is also a side confirmation of economic development," said Zhang Chuanchuan.