Sucks working on public holiday ... & I'm not even in retail or hospitality sector.
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Sucks working on public holiday ... & I'm not even in retail or hospitality sector.
I was going to make random post of locking myself in for all time with a very auspecious 888th post but I've posted a bit too much crap lately and have overshot that mark. Ah well let's plan better for 8888...
Being in the healthcare industry, public holidays are a bit of an irrelevancy. If you're rostered to work, you work. I had a couple of years in a row when I worked XMas eve, XMas day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Pay's good though. When pollies talk about cutting penalty rates, I want them to start working through the holiday seasons and weekends as a matter of routine first.
Damn straight! Some of those politicians & business experts have no clue at all. I'm sure they would change their tune if THEY had to work them. As a matter of transparancy, I no longer get penalty rates for working public holidays as I'm now a manager where I work. But for the first 14 years of my working career they definitely came in handy.
Yeah, these are the same politicians who when VIC teachers argued that while taking industrial action they wouldn't do camps (since we do them out of a sense of doing right by kids - we get no extra pay whatsoever) said in return 'why not? You only work the same hours'. Like when on camps between 4.30pm and 8.30am the teachers could bugger off and not be legally responsible for the welfare of dozens of kids away from home :rolleyes:
Heh... later this year I'm taking a group of students to Japan, and yeah, the cost of my trip is covered by the cost of the excursion. Some people have said that I'm lucky to score a "free" trip to Japan, but don't realise that it's not going to be a holiday for me because I'm going to be on duty 24 hours a day for 1.5 weeks. As your wife's rightly pointed out, that's a LOT of unpaid overtime! Normally our students bugger off at the end of the school day and we don't have to see them again until the next morning. Oh, and we're also on duty over the weekends too. I can't go and organise another TF fan meet like I did in my last week to Japan. At least, not one where we can go traipsing around collectable toy stores for an entire day and then hang out and just talk TFs the whole time. At most I might be able to organise for people to meet me maybe at a hotel foyer at night (not sure if I can do this, I still have to look into it). We even had one of our DPs criticise the fact that two teachers are going for 'free' and asked us if this was ethical. :eek: Okay, if they want us to pay our own way, fine. Then pay us the overtime! They'll find that it's cheaper to just pay for our expenses.
The other silly thing is that due to this DP's perception of "equity," she refused to allow another teacher to come with us, even though she volunteered to go and was willing to pay her own way. And the excursion is during the school holidays, so it wouldn't impact her classes or the school. The DP disallowed her from going because she thought it wouldn't be equitable, whereas in reality we would've had an extra teacher to help supervise at no additional expense to the students. :rolleyes: This DP's allowed one teacher's aide to come along at her own expense because one of the students attending has special needs.
A few years ago another colleague took some of our students to France, Germany and Austria with additional teachers and even some parents, and there was no dramas (other than their coach breaking down outside Salzburg :p). But we had different DPs at the time who obviously didn't object to this. We've actually made the decision not to include parents in this excursion, but additional teachers would've been most welcome.
P.S.: We also don't get to see our own families during this time too.
Tonight on one of the 7 network channels we have the Street Fighter Movie, while on one of the 9 network channels we have the Mortal Kombat Movie.
Two movies based on arcade games on rival networks on the same night... how weird.