Taking leave of their senses

IT is a truly modern dilemma. Do you get the 36-inch (91.4cm) high-definition TV with all the trimmings or go for the monster 50-inch (1.27m) and possibly have to rebuild a wing of your house to accommodate it and the layback seats you would buy to watch your remastered DVDs of Gone with the Wind?

"We are spoilt for choice," says one man critically comparing the cricket broadcast with my baffled and equally transfixed husband in Canberra's glittering Harvey Norman emporium.

"Unless price is a factor," mutters a disappointed Shanahan paterfamilias as Shanahan mater hauls him off to buy a set-top box. "Oh, no problem this year mate," says the other man.

"I'm not going on holidays. I am spending it on this and than I can come home and watch the cricket."

That stopped the old fella in his tracks. My husband, a journalist of the old school, well knows the perils of not taking enough leave. We know people who have literally died before taking all their leave. But this was the first time either of us had ever heard of anyone not going on their Christmas holidays in order to buy a big-screen TV.

Believe it or not this is not a one-off scenario. According to some serious research conducted in September last year by the federal government's tourism department as part of its No Leave, No Life campaign, an increasing number of people are hoarding leave, or spending the money they would have spent on a holiday -- even something traditionally modest like a couple of weeks in a caravan park with the kids -- on consumer goods.

People are going back to work much earlier than in the past or they are cancelling their holidays altogether.

Who are these people? They are a quarter of all Australian employees, and they have stockpiled, on average, 25 days or more. That is more than a month's leave. They are the backbone of middle management in Australia. Despite the ever expanding leave benefits, they work within the private and public sectors. A sizeable proportion earn $80,000 or more. And proving that in most societies the more things change the more they stay the same, they are overwhelmingly men. Two-thirds of them are men. What makes this scenario even more troubling is they are also mostly fathers. Who says the male breadwinner is a dead duck?

What is also very interesting is that according to the research leave hoarders know that stockpiling leave is not always a good thing. The reasons they do it differ, particularly between men and women. Women, particularly married women, have a more acute sense of the so-called work life balance. Women will hoard leave if they think they can take longer leave at other times, particularly for something really important, such as extending maternity leave, or to manage child care during the school holidays.

However, single women and men tend to be more work driven and their motives tend to be more driven by the work itself. So although 33 per cent say they can't take leave when it suits, when you drill down a bit you find 25 per cent of leave hoarders simply can't fit leave around a project. Consequently, one wonders how much of the leave-hoarding epidemic is involuntary. It is possible the global economic downturn has made this problem more acute, However, 16 per cent of leave-hoarders cited anxiety about job security as a deterrent to taking leave, despite the global economic situation.

The survey of leave-hoarders is particularly relevant at a time when the prime minister is talking more about encouraging productivity. We know that leave-hoarding is not conducive to productivity. However, there seems to be a growing workplace culture that encourages insecurity and a permanent on-the-job mentality as a virtue. "A large proportion of leave-hoarders are middle-management employees and business owners responsible for leading by example . . . [they are] actively cementing this stockpiling behaviour within the work culture".

There is a lot more to this story than the simple idea that working too much is bad for you. There are people who work almost all of the time, and they have huge responsibilities. Often they do it due to a sense of obligation: obligation to the organisation they work for, and their fellow workers. In the case of doctors it is the obligation to their patients, and in the case of journalists and politicians, an obligation to the public. (Absolutely nothing will stop a good journalist returning from holidays for a very big story.) Fewer tradesmen will forgo a holiday because of a sense of obligation to finish your kitchen plumbing.

But the wider implication of leave-hoarding is that our families suffer, particularly when both parents work. Children don't understand time. All they understand is there is never any of it. In our attempt to fix this we structure everything to fit things in. We send the kids to holiday camps or vacation programs. That is a classic structured adult view. Kids hate them.

Remember unstructured time? Remember going to the beach all day long, with nothing but your towel and thongs, a few younger siblings in tow, secure in the knowledge that when you got home looking like a horror poster for the cancer council someone, usually mum, would be there?

I hardly saw my parents in the summer holidays, we did crazy-brave things that would probably land them on child neglect charges today, and our entertainment was looking at the shop windows at Christmas. Some younger Shanahans, living in a house littered with old TVs and still badgering for a big-screen TV, think mum's way of spending the holidays was "sad" and unutterably daggy.

But we had time for ourselves.