DEFENDING SUMMERTIME

When business leaders complain that the summer break is 'too long', what they are really saying is workers are not being exploited enough.

WHAT APPEARS to be the business lobby’s latest crusade against New Zealand’s traditional summer break is another exercise in corporate spin. Wrapped in the language of 'productivity,' it is nothing more than an attempt to wring more hours out of workers, to turn the country into a giant assembly line where human beings are measured only by their output, in service of 'New Zealand Inc'. And now, with the Prime Minister echoing these calls, the danger is clear: the political establishment is aligning itself with corporate interests to erode one of the last bastions that many ordinary New Zealanders can still enjoy—summertime. 

The song might say that it's 'summertime and the living is easy' but that's exactly what corporate suits like the head of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce are displeased about. According to Simon Bridges, there’s a real perception the country 'shuts down until March', and that we’re seen more as 'lifestylers' than serious businesspeople.  

But grinding out more corporate profit is not the holy grail of national well-being. It is a metric designed to serve corporate boardrooms, not families. It counts profits, not joy, not health, not the strength of our communities. When business leaders complain that the summer break is 'too long,' what they are really saying is that workers are not being exploited enough, that the machinery of profit is idling when it could be whirring away. But New Zealand is not a factory. It is a society. And societies thrive when people have time to rest, to connect, to live.

The summer break is not indulgence—it is survival. It is the one stretch of the year when parents can actually spend time with their children, when communities gather for festivals and sports, when people breathe after months of relentless work. To shorten it in the name of productivity is to declare that corporate calendars matter more than human ones. It is to say that profit margins outweigh family holidays, that shareholder dividends are more important than a child’s summer memories. That is exploitation, pure and simple.

And let’s not pretend this is about efficiency. New Zealanders already work long hours compared to many OECD countries. Housing costs, inflation, and stagnant wages mean workers are under constant pressure. The summer break is one of the few counterweights to that stress, albeit a temporary one, cut it shorter, and you don’t get more productivity—you get burnout. 

What’s really at stake here is culture. New Zealand has long prided itself on valuing lifestyle as much as work. The push to shorten the summer break is an assault on what is a Kiwi institution. It is an attempt to further colonise our time, to subordinate even our holidays to the demands of the market. It is a vision of New Zealand not as a country, but as a factory floor. That is not progress—it is regression.

The irony is that the real drags on productivity lie elsewhere: poor infrastructure, underinvestment in technology, bad management, all symptoms of a failing economic system. But tackling those issues would require overturning the neoliberal applecart. It is easier, and cheaper, to demand that workers sacrifice their holidays, to give more of their time to total strangers. It's easier to blame the people at the bottom than confront the failures at the top. This is exploitation masquerading as reform.

And the government’s role in this is damning. Political leadership should defend citizens, not parrot corporate talking points. By backing calls to shorten the summer break, the Prime Minister signals that New Zealanders are seen not as citizens with rights, but as units of labour to be managed on behalf of those who own the means of production. That is a betrayal of the social contract. A government should protect the time and well-being of its people, not collude in stripping it away.

New Zealanders must resist. We must remind ourselves that productivity is not the highest good, that the measure of a nation is not how many hours its people work, but how well they live. To shorten it would be to concede that New Zealand is nothing more than a factory, that our lives are subordinate to capital. That is not the country that most of us want to live in. 

The business sector will always demand more labour, more hours, more sacrifice in the name of corporate profit. That is the nature of the beast. But we must not let that demand define us. New Zealand is not a machine. It is a society of people who deserve time to live, unshackled from their places of work. The summer break is not too long. The problem is not that workers have too much time off. The problem is that corporations and politicians have too much power to dictate how we spend our lives. And it is time we just said no.  

Extra: One commentator who has consistently bemoaned New Zealand's lack of 'productivity' is Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking. This week he began his nine-week summer break.