The War on Public Holidays Is Far Too Lazy

Governments struggling to plug budget gaps are eyeing holidays as an easy target, but how much does an axed day off really contribute to the economy?

- Chris Bryant

Worries about fiscal sustainability and tepid economic growth are enticing governments to embrace a simple but controversial step: Reduce the number of public holidays, so employees produce more.

Yet the economic benefit of doing this is marginal. There are better ways to boost productivity and the number of hours worked that would neutralise bitter conflicts about how the economic cake is divided.

French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou's plan to scrap two of the country's 11 national holidays amid a budgetary crisis has triggered predictable outrage in a country that prizes leisure and a 35-hour work week. But he's in good company: Slovakia, which has a relatively generous 14 public holidays, in June said it would reclassify one of these as a working day to plug a hole in the budget. In 2023, Denmark abolished the Great Prayer Day springtime holiday to help pay for rearmament.

Economists and business groups in Germany and Finland have mooted similar ideas. Even US President Donald Trump, an improbable Stakhanovite, posted on Truth Social in June that the US has "too many non-working holidays", which he claimed are costing the country billions of dollars. (His post coincided with Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the US.)

The notion that most Americans don't work enough actually seems far-fetched to this European: The US has 11 public holidays, the same as France, yet it doesn't guarantee paid time off, whereas the French are entitled to at least five weeks.