Huge numbers of people are losing a crucial part of modern life: the ability to afford an annual holiday
THERE ARE tipping points in all processes, moments which clearly mark the watershed between a “before” and an “after”. Judge van Pelt Bryan of the New York southern district court determined one on “decency” 50 years ago.
His judgment concerned the seizure by the US post office of a renowned, if largely unpublished book which had first seen the light of day in Italy back in 1928. Under an 1873 law the US post office could seize publications it deemed to be lewd. In 1959 the Grove Press sued the post office for confiscating copies of its uncensored edition of D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The judge ruled that while Lawrence’s work did contain graphic sex scenes, these had to be seen as part of a greater oeuvre.
He added that pure expression, unattached to conduct, was protected by the US First Amendment on freedom of speech.
Lady Chatterley's Lovershot into second place on the 0best-seller list. The following year Penguin published an edition in Lawrence's native Britain and won a landmark trial under the Obscene Publications Act in November 1960.
It now seems more bizarre than repugnant that groups of officials could even consider determining what adult citizens should be allowed to read but for many decades – most particularly and savagely in Ireland – such censorship was the accepted norm.
June 1936 offers another tipping point when France’s left-wing Front Populaire government introduced a statutory minimum 12 days of annual paid holidays. Although many French employees had gone on holidays before 1936, it suddenly became a universal right.
A right they rushed to enjoy in their hundreds of thousands by train, by bus and by bicycle.
Coastal resorts and rural idylls which had hitherto been the preserve of the more fortunate witnessed the explosion of camping sites, pools and brasseries as ordinary people arrived to relax.
The entitlement of up to five weeks of paid annual holidays has become almost hard-wired into European genes over the years since 1936. We are, however, starkly reminded that progress is neither linear, nor is it guaranteed.
The French Secours Populaire charity estimates that more than one-third of children and over 40 per cent of adults did not go on holidays at all in 2008.
It expects both figures to rise in 2009, and most probably in 2010.
Those in receipt of social minima often cannot afford to go on even the most modest of holidays, but local authorities and NGOs are used to offering support to this group.
A new impoverished group must also now be taken into account, the working poor. The emergence of the working poor is one of the more damning testimonies to the failure of our recent neo-liberal economic madness. More and more people with jobs simply cannot earn enough to survive, never mind go on holidays.
A third group includes those who can afford to take a break but who, fearing for their futures, feel obliged to stay at home and hoard whatever savings their frugality generates.
This group would most likely be well represented among the two-thirds of Irish people who believe the worst of the economic crisis is yet to come – and the 24 per cent who are not confident of having a job in two years’ time, according to last Friday’s Eurobarometer survey. Years of unrestrained economic folly have undermined what we used to think of as normal ratios between basic and executive pay rates.
The recession is now battering us all, and in the classic nature of tempests, the most vulnerable are the hardest hit and the least well equipped to survive.
The fact that rates of economic decline are slowing is seen as good news speaks volumes about just how bad things are. The US economy is now set to shrink by “only” 2.6 per cent, Japan’s by closer to six, while China is on track to achieve 8 per cent growth. The World Bank’s director of economic forecasting, Hans Timmer, suggests that “China will be among the first countries to lead the global economy out of this recession”.
The unacknowledged “elephant in the room” in all this is unemployment. There is an understandable time lag between economic decline and rising rates of unemployment as businesses try to stagger on.
There is an almost parallel time lag between a return to economic growth and job creation seriously taking off. Even if we see a return to modest growth in 2010, unemployment rates may not fall significantly for another year or 18 months.
US unemployment is heading for 10 per cent next year, with the OECD predicting nigh on 12 per cent in the euro zone and the IMF estimating Irish unemployment to well exceed 15 per cent in 2010.
Most of our systems, in particular the oft-lauded Nordic flexible ones, were designed to support people through a relatively short transition and re-training period until they found a new job.
Economists and commentators, particularly those who sang the praises of our unsustainable booms, wring their hands in anxiety about the effect on public finances of benefit payments to the jobless millions.
There has been little discussion of how we might harness the skills and resources of our legions of unemployed, and even less about how we might get them back to work.
Millions of educated people across Europe will not be content to simply survive on ever-dwindling welfare payments.
Pressure for a “decent” life will build and unless our political and economic leaders respond, a tipping point becomes likely.
It will be about a different form of “decency” from the one Judge van Pelt Bryan ruled on, but about decency all the same.