Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of Teaching in China.

This Friday, May the 1st, is China’s Labour Day — a national holiday to celebrate the toils of the worker, so our school is closed for the day. But since Friday is one of my usual weekly days off, I asked if I could choose which day I would like to have off in lieu, as we have done in the past when a public holiday falls on a regular day off.

“Oh, you’ve actually already had it,” came the reply. “Remember during Spring Festival when we gave everybody a four-day break instead of the usual three? That’s because we ‘borrowed’ one day from Labour Day.”

In other words, the company took it upon themselves to move our public holiday by three months and tack it onto another one. Whilst the one-day-longer Spring Festival break was of course welcome, extending the period that employees have to go until their next long weekend is not so good for morale. And since the school is still closed for this Labour Day, the poor people who don’t usually have Fridays off have to actually make up for the closure by working one of their days off during the next couple of weeks. As you can imagine, there are some unhappy mutterings going on below management level.

Still, it could be worse. Last month the local government in Guǎngdōng (广东) province announced plans to return the Labour Day holiday to its former status as a week-long public holiday [a so-called Golden Week], in order to stimulate the local economy. The plan was initially approved by the Central Government and people duly went ahead and booked trips lasting most of the week. But when several other regions also announced plans to follow suit, the Central Government reneged and Guǎngdōng was forced to scrap its official plans. But it looks as though lots of people are still going ahead with their trips, presumably either taking a couple of days of their annual leave, or perhaps even asking for unpaid leave.

Now I’m not an economist, but it seems to me that officially announcing a public holiday, only to cancel it after people have already made plans, is not only going to make people a bit annoyed [since when has that ever affected a policy change decision?], but more importantly is actually going to negatively affect the local economy, as people who go ahead with their trips are forced to save even more that usual to make up for spending-without-earning. I’m sure there have been plenty of unhappy mutterings down in Guǎngdōng this past month or so too.

I’ve just started working at the Longwin Modern English training centre (环亚琅文现代英语培训) in Sūzhōu (苏州), under the management of Michael Hsu.

So far, everything seems okay.