Paid Holidays

Extract

Holidays with pay is an idea which performs the almost impossible—it pleases everybody. The only people who really ought to object to it, on their own principles, are a few Catholic Distributists who display an excessive veneration for work and thrift and a rather puritanical hatred of the very words “leisure” and “plenty.” But even these, I feel sure, will not have the heart to be too consistent in this case.

We who preach the new economics naturally welcome the holidays-for-all-with-pay movement as a sort of miracle that confirms the truth of what we say. It is not consumer-credit, to be sure; essentially it is no more than an increase of wages with a shortening of hours. But it does prepare the way for consumer credit, and it does mean more purchasing-power in the pockets of the consumer as such. It does distribute money through some channel that is not exactly production. Above all it does make a beginning of a psychological break between the idea of work and the idea of a living or income. Or (to put it another way) it educates people towards the idea that work is something to be desired for its own sake, not because a living has to be earned by some drudgery or other.