Perhaps it's time to abolish statutory holiday pay

We can imagine some getting a little outraged at this suggestion but perhaps it's time to remove one of the great distortions in the labour market: it's time to abolish statutory holiday pay. Currently:

Almost all workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday per year (known as statutory leave entitlement or annual leave). An employer can include bank holidays as part of statutory annual leave.

Self-employed workers aren’t entitled to annual leave.

From the US we hear that these sorts of rules are killing parts of that gig economy:

This is one of the first startup casualties as a result of the worker classification issue that has gripped the tech industry. Many companies in the gig economy, such as Uber, Postmates, Luxe and Sprig, classify their workers as contractors instead of employees. As a result they don’t have to foot payroll taxes, social security benefits, vacation time or other fees. But workers have filed lawsuits over the issue, and it’s now become a heavily debated talking point among the presidential candidates.

Loading the employment of labour with all of these things (and we could add maternity and paternity leave and so on) makes labour cost more to employ. Well, obviously. but insisting that people take a defined bundle of benefits reduces the value of selling our labour. For if we receive instead just the cash we can decide ourselves, according to our own personal utility maximisation calculations, how we are going to allocate the rewards of our labour over children, retirement, leisure and other forms of consumption. what this problem in the gig economy is doing is making those costs plain to all: some people are willing to do things in exactly that all cash manner and do the allocations themselves. Insisting that they take the defined bundle destroys those jobs they're quite happy doing.

Of course, some will say that everyone must therefore be forced into that standard bundle. But we think there's a liberty argument to be made for instead destroying the very idea of that standard bundle being imposed. Let wages be paid in cash, only cash and purely cash and everyone then gets to decide how they're going to structure their leisure, retirement, child rearing and everything else.

Why should the State insist on either a minimum or maximum amount of leisure for us?