Do your holidays always feel too short? Or are you a parent struggling to juggle the demands of school holidays with the leave you're allowed to take?

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On Wednesday, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) launched a major push to give working Australians the right to an extra week of annual leave.

The peak union body says rising work pressures and long hours of extra unpaid work simply aren't accounted for in the current minimum entitlement to four weeks - which hasn't changed in about five decades.

In a statement, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus said Australia's system was lagging other countries and had fallen out of step with the times: "The majority of European countries have already moved beyond four weeks [...] It's time Australia caught up, our annual leave has been frozen at four weeks since the mid-1970s."

Major business groups, however, quickly voiced their opposition. The Australian Industry Group's chief executive, Innes Willox, called the proposal "out of touch with reality", given the nation is in a "productivity crisis that is driving up inflation".

What are the unions asking for?

The ACTU is calling for full-time employees to have a minimum right to five weeks off, up from the current level of four (pro rata for part-time employees).

For shift worker employees, who currently have a right to five weeks off, they want an increase to six (pro rata for part-time shift workers).

There are some obvious upsides to giving workers an extra week's leave. These include people having more time to rest and enjoy leisure time - and also to manage other important commitments outside work.

The right to paid annual leave hasn't been around for as long as you might think in Australia. The printing industry was the first to win the right to a week of paid annual leave in the mid-1930s. In 1941, it became........

© Canberra Times