More public holidays to stop golden mess

In the past 16 years, Golden Weeks have all proved to be "golden messes"; the just concluded National Day holiday being no exception. Visits to scenic spots during the weeklong holidays are usually a nightmare of traffic jams and crowds. In the opinion of some experts the answer is paid leave, so people take their holidays at different times.

However, such an idealistic prescription won't help. As the right of workers to take paid leave, which has been written in the labor law since 1995, faces difficulties being put into practice in China, since there is no detailed legal punishment for an employer that violates the right of its employees to paid leave, and employers seldom get punished for denying workers this right.

According to Cai Jiming, a researcher on the holiday economy at Tsinghua University, a worker in China enjoys on average about 10 days of paid leave every year, which is quite short compared to that in many other countries. In Germany, for example, the paid leave can be as long as one month, or three times that of China. In a comparison of 60 countries Cai found that on average workers enjoyed 19 days of paid leave a year.

Strict implementation of paid leave is of course necessary, but it can only be realized with better protection of the other rights of workers, which will be a long process. Since many Chinese workers still suffer from extra work without extra pay and contracts heavily weighted in favor of employers, it is hardly possible to protect their right to paid leave alone.

A more practical and effective way would be to increase the number of public holidays first. Actually, one week-long vacation means only three additional rest days, with the other four being adjusted from existing weekends. If China sets two or three of them every year, that would grant workers the chance to rest every three to four months, while the number of public holidays will be increased by only three to six days.