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City quiet as workers told to stay on holiday

EVEN at Bronte on one of Sydney's steamiest summer days, Christian Piotrowski couldn't leave work behind. The accountant, who is on a month's leave, has spent his extended holiday studying in the sun.
Mr Piotrowski is one of many Sydney workers who have fled to the beach over summer, leaving the CBD unusually empty for this time of year. For him, the extra-long holiday was voluntary but for some of his colleagues it was not.

His firm, like many others, has asked some of its workers to take extra annual leave this summer because of the drop in business activity.

Services firm KPMG and MLC Insurance both granted sections of their workforce an extra week of leave over the summer break, partly because of the financial downturn. An MLC spokeswoman, Stacey Mitchell, said extra leave was granted "depending on workloads and resourcing requirements".

Likewise at KPMG's Sydney office, several business units were told to take an extra week off in January, on top of the company's usual two-week closure. "If you didn't have client work, then you had to take an extra week," a KPMG financial adviser, who was told by email to extend his holiday, said.

"If you really didn't like it and you wanted to come in, there's probably not a lot they could do about it. But it wouldn't be a very smart thing to do,"he added.

Shaw Stockbroking's chief executive, Harold Shapiro, said to avoid redundancies, staff agreed to take leave between late December and mid-January. "Between February and July they will take another month off," he said. "It certainly saves on any forced redundancies."

Even traffic is marginally lighter than it was last year.

Peter Rochfort, an industrial relations adviser with clients across a range of industries, said companies needed to heed the warning by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, that businesses find alternatives to sacking workers.

He compared the need to retain workers to last year's equine influenza outbreak.
"Nobody shot every bloody horse in Australia because there was EI," he said. "They kept them at great expense, on the basis the racing industry would be restored. Things come good, and when they do we've got to have the resources there to take advantage of it."
Mr Piotrowski is not letting worry about the future ruin his holiday. While business was definitely sluggish at the city firm where he works, he said being an accountant was a boon in times like these. "Accounting is quite recession-proof."