Starting today we are celebrating five holidays just within
two month’s time.
We’ve got today – Discovery Day, followed by 4 June to
celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, 18 June to honour the Queen
again for her birthday, 2 July for Constitution Day and 18 July for a
referendum on the one-person, one-vote issue.
That’s a lot of days off when businesses will be making less
or no money. They’ll be paying overhead costs and overtime to employees who
have to work on those days.
While everyone enjoys a day off from work now and then, we
believe there are too many public holidays for businesses in the Cayman Islands
this year.
Sick days invariably go up on Fridays before bank holiday
Mondays. And if a holiday falls on a Wednesday, you can bet that many people
will take advantage to have an extended weekend or, if they do show up to work,
Thursdays become slack days and productivity falls even lower on the Fridays
following the mid-week holiday.
The referendum is an extremely important matter to this
territory and all those who are registered to vote should turn out to mark
their ballots. But the government could have come up with some creative ways to
hold the referendum without declaring another holiday.
This newspaper suggested holding the vote on a Saturday.
The Chamber of Commerce had suggestions, too, of how to hold
a referendum without doing damage to businesses, but nobody asked its opinion.
As it said, government could have mandated an hour break for
people to vote or extended voting hours earlier and later; all worthy
suggestions.
Public holidays are expensive everywhere. The Centre for
Economics and Business Research think tank in the United Kingdom estimates that
bank holidays alone cost that country roughly 19 billion pounds a year. That’s
about CI$25.6 billion.
While the cost to Cayman surely isn’t quite that much, it is
vast.
Just ask any small business owner.
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