Fancy a holiday? You should probably think again

On the day thousands of Londoners took an impromptu holiday courtesy of striking tube drivers, thousands of miles to the east Japanese workers at Toshiba were told to cancel all summer leave.

Not great news it would seem. Certainly not in the short-term and not if you've just got the deal of a lifetime on lastminute.co.jp. But the fact that Toshiba's microchip plants will have to go into overdrive this summer to cope with unexpected demand has got to be good news for long-term job prospects.

"The market is healthier than we'd expect," a company spokesman said.

Turn the clock back 12 months and contrast with the news that was coming out of the west coast of the US at the time. Back then staff at Sun, Compaq and Adobe were instructed to turn their Independence Day weekend celebrations into a week. The time would naturally come out of their annual allowance - almost 50 per cent of their annual allowance as you're asking - and, no, there was no choice in the matter.

The firms concerned duly shutdown facilities for a week, a cost-cutting idea designed to offset a slowdown in sales.

Perhaps holiday policy should become the newest index to gauge the relative health of various sectors of our industry. Japanese microchip market, up. US software market, down.

This kind of thinking does, however, turn our whole world upside down. How many UK workers would ever equate holidays with bad news? Or more time at work as good news? It's not in our psyche.

But maybe that's an outmoded vision of the average worker. According to a survey out last week, 30 per cent of holidaymakers spend as much as half a day during their time off reading work-related emails. A similar survey last summer found three-quarters of UK managers accessed their messages on holiday.

Work-shy? Quite the opposite - and that's probably just as well.