Leaping to conclusions
Leap days are a swizz!
Until about 10 years ago, I was always pretty neutral in debates about Summer Time. Abolish it, have double Summer Time, have all-year-round Summer Time, etc? Who cares. And then I had badly-sleeping infants,* whereupon it became very apparent that most of the arguments either way might well be a wash, but changing the clocks twice a year had such a massive disruptive impact that this practice should be discontinued forthwith.
Similar arguments apply around leap seconds: the argument against them (which has some force) is that our systems are so flaky they mess up every time we add a leap second, and these problems are only going to get worse because it is simultaneously true that code is eating the world and that programmers are lazy, and who even knows what a mean sun is, let alone cares about it?
(For the record, I do, and I also know and care about TAI, UT1 and TT, and I am on balance in favour of retaining leap seconds in UTC, but it's a hard call.)
Leap days have, until now, escaped these arguments. We just assume we have to have them.
Well, I've just realised we (for many values of we) are being conned out of a day's work every leap year. I get my salary paid in 1/12th amounts every month. This means I get less per day in January than in February, but it evens out over the year.
Except in leap years! In a leap year, I have an extra working day, but no extra pay. If I refuse to work for a day (a strike) I get my pay deducted by 1/365th if the management are sympathetic to the strike - if they're playing neutral it's something like 1/260th, and 1/220th if they're hostile. I have worked on several February 29ths in the past and did not receive any extra pay. I know of no plans for extra pay on Monday 29th February.
One line of argument about Summer Time (aka Daylight Savings Time) is that we lose an hour when the clocks go forward in Spring, and that this is Bad. But it works out Ok because we gain one later when they go back in the Autumn. This doesn't happen with leap days. We don't get a free day back.
Some might argue that some years February 29th happens on a weekend. True indeed, but more often it doesn't, so on average it's still about 5/7th of a day of extra unpaid work. Actually, I think it's slightly more than that because of how the Gregorian calendar works over its 400-year cycle, but I haven't done the detailed sums.
This is one of the few situations where hourly-paid workers do better than salaried ones, of course. More working hours directly translates in to more pay.
But for salaried workers, leap days are a swindle!
* This is a misleading but traditional description of the situation. In fact the infants slept fine, for them. It was their parents who struggled.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/311984.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Until about 10 years ago, I was always pretty neutral in debates about Summer Time. Abolish it, have double Summer Time, have all-year-round Summer Time, etc? Who cares. And then I had badly-sleeping infants,* whereupon it became very apparent that most of the arguments either way might well be a wash, but changing the clocks twice a year had such a massive disruptive impact that this practice should be discontinued forthwith.
Similar arguments apply around leap seconds: the argument against them (which has some force) is that our systems are so flaky they mess up every time we add a leap second, and these problems are only going to get worse because it is simultaneously true that code is eating the world and that programmers are lazy, and who even knows what a mean sun is, let alone cares about it?
(For the record, I do, and I also know and care about TAI, UT1 and TT, and I am on balance in favour of retaining leap seconds in UTC, but it's a hard call.)
Leap days have, until now, escaped these arguments. We just assume we have to have them.
Well, I've just realised we (for many values of we) are being conned out of a day's work every leap year. I get my salary paid in 1/12th amounts every month. This means I get less per day in January than in February, but it evens out over the year.
Except in leap years! In a leap year, I have an extra working day, but no extra pay. If I refuse to work for a day (a strike) I get my pay deducted by 1/365th if the management are sympathetic to the strike - if they're playing neutral it's something like 1/260th, and 1/220th if they're hostile. I have worked on several February 29ths in the past and did not receive any extra pay. I know of no plans for extra pay on Monday 29th February.
One line of argument about Summer Time (aka Daylight Savings Time) is that we lose an hour when the clocks go forward in Spring, and that this is Bad. But it works out Ok because we gain one later when they go back in the Autumn. This doesn't happen with leap days. We don't get a free day back.
Some might argue that some years February 29th happens on a weekend. True indeed, but more often it doesn't, so on average it's still about 5/7th of a day of extra unpaid work. Actually, I think it's slightly more than that because of how the Gregorian calendar works over its 400-year cycle, but I haven't done the detailed sums.
This is one of the few situations where hourly-paid workers do better than salaried ones, of course. More working hours directly translates in to more pay.
But for salaried workers, leap days are a swindle!
* This is a misleading but traditional description of the situation. In fact the infants slept fine, for them. It was their parents who struggled.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/311984.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.