Great innovations in travel: Paid Leave

Paid Leave is an invention of the modern times. The right for employees to be away from work and continue receiving the same pay during that time. Before paid leave was introduced, people worked 6 days a week, year round. Or 7 days a week. To compensate some, there were lots of public holidays here and there, to enable people to catch their breath. Only the Idle Class travelled. That made for a very thin customer base for the Travel Industry. You were not going to build a Tourism Industry with that.

Do you want to give it a guess as to when paid leave was introduced? France actually gets credited for it – surprise. But the complex answer actually varies from country to country, and from category to category. Based on what I know, public servants in France were granted public leave as early as the 1850’s. And I imagine that judges and school teachers always had public leave. Some 20 years later, in Britain the first employees to obtain leave were Bank Industry workers. The word has taken hold, in Britain you still talk of “bank holidays”. Then the concept spread – to Canada and the USA, Germany etc. Back in France, paid leave for all was introduced in 1936 – nearly 100 years later.

Interestingly, Paid Leave was not necessarily a popular cause with worker’s unions. In the eyes of many, capping the work to 8 hours a day was more of a priority. As a matter of fact, paid leave was often introduced not at the request of workers’ unions. When it did happen, Paid Leave often didn’t cause people to travel, they had neither the means nor the intuition to get on the road. In other words, first came the law, social change did not necessarily follow.

This topic requires more reading, I am citing what little I know. I do know that rules vary tremendously from country to country. My favorite is Australia’s long service leave. After you work 10 years for an employer, you are entitled to a (one-time) additional paid leave of two months. Not bad, is it? I read this as the sign of a labor market that is in the favor of supply – of the work force. Of course, if you live in Australia, you live so far from everywhere else that you do need that extra time simply to get to your destination.

So my point? The rise of the travel industry has depended not only on tech innovations, but also on social change. Paid Leave is the single most important social change I can think of.

Now may I offer a parting note: the introduction of “unlimited vacations” in US companies, for all its allure, actually spells disaster for our industry. As a reminder, under US law paid leave is a perk left to the employer’s appreciation, not a right protected by law. Officially, present-day “Unlimited Vacation” means that you can take as much vacation as you wish, provided that you get your work done of course. In practice, it means so many people take little to no holiday. They are too afraid of showing to be slacking. As a matter of fact, unlimited vacation also has another name, and a fitting one. It’s better known as “no vacation policy”.

Now to end on an optimistic note, imagine what a boost it would be for the Tourism Industry if US companies gave employees more holiday time. In so many destination countries, US travelers are an important total of the demographics, and one that are not afraid to spend, either. Now 25% of the US work force are not entitled paid leave, imagine if the law made holiday a right for all workers. Also, today most US corporations start with a two-week holiday, plus a handful of sick days. Imagine the bonanza if they moved closer to European standards – 33 days in Germany, 36 in France, 40 in Austria…