Holiday chaos

The thought struck me last Wednesday as I sat in my car, trapped in an infernal jam caused by too many people frantically chasing work to be done before yet another long weekend descended upon us.

We have too many holidays.

I don’t have all the facts on hand. But I am willing to bet good money that we live in a society with the most number of holidays in the whole world.

Count them.

We have a rather large number of secular public holidays. We celebrate our independence day like most nations do. We celebrate defeats such as April 9, when Bataan fell to the Japanese Imperial forces. We celebrate the birth of one hero, Andres Bonifacio, and the death of another, Jose Rizal. Off and on, July 4th is celebrated here as Filipino-American Friendship Day.

Labor Day, which fell on Thursday last week, is not a holiday in most countries. But it is here.

The anniversary of the Edsa Revolution is a holiday. At some point, Edsa 2 might be declared a holiday too. Sometimes the anniversary of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination is a holiday.

During the dictatorship, Ferdinand E. Marcos’ birthday was a national holiday, something called Baranggay Day. There were years, I recall, when the birthday of his wife was made a holiday, too, on some officious excuse I forget now.

Christmas and New year’s Day are holidays. Most of the days between and around them are holidays too.

A number of Christian dates are holidays in this country. The Holy Week is particularly observed. All Saint’s Day is revered. One day we might begin observing the birth date of our first saint, Lorenzo Ruiz as a holiday as well.

Should we be carried away by multiculturalism, we might permanently declare the end of Ramadan a national holiday. We did that last year.

Election days are holidays, too, in this country. They are regular working days nearly everywhere else.

In addition, towns and cities declare a holiday during town fiesta’s and city foundation days.

With all our holidays, it’s a wonder we get any work done in this country. If we cut the number of our holidays by half, that should have a significant effect on the growth of our GDP.

In addition to the large number of holidays officially observed, we have a tendency to declare as "special non-working holidays" those days caught between a weekend and a regular holiday. That idea has been further amplified by a strange new discipline that enraptured President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

That idea is called "holiday economics."

I have always been baffled by that concept. It seems an oxymoron. Economies grow when people work and create wealth; not when they take off from work and indulge in officially sanctioned idleness.

Last Wednesday, I was besieged by foreign diplomats demanding an explanation on the inspiration that moved the President’s whimsical decisions regarding work for last Friday. First she said that only Labor Day would be a holiday. Then she declared that government would be closed down on May 2, apparently to create yet another long weekend to boost holiday economics. After that she declared that private sector companies may or may not open for work on May 2.

The foreign embassies were exasperated. They didn’t know whether or not to open their consular services for the unscheduled holiday. People with flights scheduled during the long weekend would be on the verge of a riot if embassies closed down their consular services.

Businessmen were exasperated. They had checks clearing on a day when no one was sure which businesses would be functioning and which would not.

As a person who would rather work seven days a week, I find this obsession with holidays completely disconcerting.

I suppose the number of holidays adds to the already unbearably high cost of doing business in this country. How can our companies be cost competitive with rivals elsewhere if the workforce is paid for too many idle days?

The sheer number of holidays magnifies the fact that our labor is already overpriced. Those holidays reduce the classroom time of our pupils, undermining our efforts to build a world-class workforce. They cause delays in processing of everything, from official papers to export products.

The sheer number of holidays aggravates the fact that we lose schooldays and workdays each time a typhoon passes the country or each time heavy rains cause flooding.

We have the longest Christmas season in the world. By the middle of December, everything grounds to a halt. With long holidays such as Holy Week and the Christmas break, and with all the long weekends arbitrarily created by whimsical holidays announced as late as two days before work is called off, how can we ever generate momentum on anything?

We are a society that seems to be on vacation half the time.

Holidays are, to be sure, politically profitable. It encourages an unproductive ethic among our people: an inexplicable joy at being paid for days when no work is done.

I know our tourism officials are trying to sell the country as a vacation spot. But must this country itself be on semi-permanent vacation mode?

It might be time to consider the sheer number of holidays in this country as national calamity.

Instead of celebrating the great number of holidays we have in this country, we should mourn it. We should be embarrassed by the fact that we prefer not to work and still cling to the hope of progress.

Instead of celebrating the great number of holidays we have in this country, we might consider militantly arguing a return to the old-fashioned work ethic that built up many of our neighboring societies. We might consider demanding the right to work, the opportunity to create wealth in all our waking hours.

The sheer number of workdays and the long hours of labor are, after all, the rudiments of the Asian Miracle. Perhaps the vastly lesser number of workdays and the lesser hours of labor in this country explain why the Asian Miracle bypassed us.