Word: holidayers
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Clinton's recent embrace of a "gas-tax holiday" - an idea dismissed by others in her party as a bit of ineffective pandering - also reinforced questions about her trustworthiness. In Indiana exit polls, a full quarter of Clinton's own supporters said that they did not think she was honest. Just as Obama suffered in Ohio for looking like he was too political on NAFTA, Clinton's position on the gas tax issue riled Indiana voters, who consistently raised it in conversations with reporters the weekend before the primary vote...
...Well, not quite everyone. Owners and managers of many businesses have traditionally snarled at May's propensity for kidnapping work days and undermining productivity. Technically, a work day taken off to bridge a holiday to a weekend qualifies as an absence or vacation day. But over the decades ponts have become a kind of de facto entitlement. Since most businesses are reduced to skeleton staffs during such periods, bosses long ago decided to give in, close shop and enjoy the extra time off along with everyone else...
...some companies - notably transport groups whose trucks are banned from driving during holiday weekends - say their schedules are so disrupted by May ponts that they now close business for the first half of the month and force employees to take it off as vacation-whether they want to or not. By contrast, companies in the tourism sector say May has become a one of the best months of the year outside the summer vacation season...
...Ironically, 2008 is also notable for the return of two entities particularly beloved by employees and despised by their bosses. First is the return of the obscure Christian holy day of Whit Monday as a national holiday, just four years after it was demoted to a regular working day - one, in fact, for which employees wouldn't even be paid. That strange concept was introduced in 2004 by a previous right-wing government, which wanted the proceeds from a worked (but not remunerated) Whit Monday to fund care for the elderly. Earlier this year, France's conservative government reversed...
...That restoration of Whit Monday as a public holiday has meanwhile created another phenomenon favored by the French: the transformation of the long-weekend "bridge" into an even longer "viaduct." With Whit Monday falling on May 12 this year, the four-day weekend set to begin with the Victory Day celebration on May 8 will now extend itself all the way to the following Tuesday morning. French lovers of such five-day "viaduct" weekends had better savor this one, however: in 2009 all May holidays fall on either a Friday or Monday - making even "pont" construction impossible...