Inner Workings of Make-Up Workday Offer Perfect Working Example of Why Hungary's Economy Isn't

Shortly after 1:00 p.m. last Saturday afternoon I went down to get some groceries out of my car, which had been parked a few minutes earlier on a street in District VI, and found a parking ticket on my windscreen. What's this, I thought, reasoning that it was a Saturday, and that on Saturdays one only needed to put money on the meter until noon. And then I walked over to the parking meter halfway down the block, which was plastered with the above sticker nicely informing me - in two languages! - that it was actually a work day that Saturday, and thus until 6:00 p.m. I needed to pay to park on the street.

How, you may ask, did Saturday, March 28 become a workday in Hungary? Interestingly, the story goes back to sometime last year, when the government decreed that Friday, January 2nd would be an official holiday. This was done in keeping with its practice of ordering all employers to give their employees a "bridge" day off if an official holiday (in this case, New Year's Day) were to fall on a Thursday or a Tuesday. But rather than just mandating that January 2nd be a holiday, and getting the whole thing done with, the government announced that everyone would have to making up the lost workday on Saturday, January 10th.

So what happened on January 10th?

As you may dimly recall, it was at this time that squabbling between Russian and Ukraine over the price of gas supplied by the former to the latter resulted in Russian temporarily cutting gas transshipments to Ukraine, and Ukraine temporarily cutting gas transshipments to Hungary. While reassuring everyone that Hungary had more than enough gas to make it through the now-annual Russia-Ukraine gas "blow-up," the government nevertheless decided that Saturday, January 10th would in fact not be a workday, so as to avoid the unnecessary burning of gas by commercial users.

This no doubt came as a surprise to a least a few Hungarians, who would have shown up at work that frigid Saturday only to discover it was actually a genuine Saturday, rather than the Friday before last. But most working folks probably didn't make the mistake, having been briefed in great detail by their co-workers and HR managers about the fact that the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor had, after much careful deliberation and coordination with other ministries - possibly including some emergency scenarios gamed out by expensive consultants over the New Year's weekend itself - announced that Friday, January 2nd would instead be talking place on Saturday, March 28.

I don't know when my local parking company decided to print up and distribute special "Remember, Saturday, March 28th is actually Friday, January 2nd" notices, or whether there are cubic meters of shiny "Remember, Saturday, January 10th is actually Friday, January 2nd" stickers currently not decomposing in a landfill somewhere on the outskirts of town. But here's what I do know: given the amount of time and effort that went into figuring out what to do with Friday, January 2 - and the fact that no one ever really works on these "make-up" days anyway - they might have just given people the damn day off. People wonder why the Hungarian economy has the productivity of a well-tuned sports car with a fuel tank full of raspberry syrup. Now you know.

As for why I wasn't working on Saturday, March 28th, the answer is that, after several hours of discussion and negotiation on Monday, March 16 and Tuesday, March 17th, my office voted 3-0 to move the 28th up to Saturday, March 21st. But don't tell the government: They'll probably spend half a day writing up a formal notice saying our made-up make-up day wasn't official enough, and ordering us to make it up on some Saturday in August.