Capillary Economics

[steepholm]

Have you ever considered that leap years are a tax on the bourgeoisie?

Blue-collar and part-time workers tend to get paid hourly, daily or weekly; white-collar jobs are usually paid monthly. In a leap year, the income of a monthly-paid worker remains the same as in a non-leap year, meaning that the extra day is effectively unpaid labour; whereas someone paid by the hour, day or week will of course get extra money for the extra day.

I would like to say that the universe arranged this as a kind of redistributive fiscal policy, but sadly the extra money raised by the unpaid labour of the middle-classes doesn't go to the less well off - except, perhaps, to a small extent, in the case of public-sector workers. It's trickle-up economics, as usual. The solar system is a Tory - but I suppose we already knew that from Ulysses:

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans cheque to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

Comments

[calimac]

In that case, any month over 28 days is a tax on the bourgeoisie.

While any number of years without leap days have an average of 30.4167 days/month, include leap years and there's an average of 30.4375 days/month, which if I've calculated this correctly is a difference of about half an hour. More like eight minutes if you're only allotting work time. Surely they've figured that into the pay scale already if it makes any difference at all?

[steepholm]

One extra day per 1460 or so is of course not a very swingeing tax, you're right. But they could only figure it into the pay scale by paying a slightly higher annual salary in leap years than in non-leap years, which of course they don't. And while one might argue that it all evens out over a four-year cycle of work, not everyone stays in a job for four years. If A works in a job for two years, then B works the same job for the next two years for the same annual salary, then whichever one of them got the year with March 29 was doing unpaid labour that day. I'm not saying the is the most pressing issue in labour relations today, mind - just maundering.

[calimac]

Outweighed, surely, by the variation in the number of 28, 30, and 31 day months in different short-term employees' periods of employment?

[steepholm]

Certainly a monthly paid worker who worked July and August would be hard done by in comparison with another monthly-paid worker who worked February and March. But as a class, monthly-paid workers lose out over leap years in a way that hour, daily and weekly-paid workers do not.

I'm not saying it's a big issue!

[calimac]

I'm not saying it's a big issue either. But, depending on which months their employment covers, two workers who work the same number of months could be different by up to 3 in the number of days worked, and that's only calculating length of month and not number of holidays. And if they're monthly-paid workers who are only there for a couple of years, that's a bigger difference than one leap day.