Faire un pont

I thought this was a funny way for Spain to address their vacation problem:

Tatiana Restrepo has a vacation problem. The Spanish government thinks she takes too many of them.

Every year, she, like many Spaniards, strategically deploys paid vacation days as puentes—literally, bridges—to skip town for an extra-long weekend whenever public holidays fall in the middle three days of a week.
…
But now the time-honored tradition is under threat. In one of several measures designed to boost productivity in a sagging economy, Spain's unions and business associations have agreed to suppress three bridges by moving the holidays to Mondays. The two sides, which rarely agree on anything, say the bridges cost the Spanish economy hundreds of millions of euros in lost production, as they result in idle plants and half-empty offices.

I don’t think Spain is the only country to do this—the French font un pont also—but to my knowledge they’re the first to address it. I don’t know if this is the right way though: if they’re keeping the number of holidays constant, and they’re keeping the number of vacation days constant, doesn’t that mean that total time off will be pretty close to status quo ante? If you’re the kind of person who likes to make a bridge between your weekend and your holiday, you’re the kind of person who likes to take holidays, whenever. You’ll probably just take your vacations at other times. In fact, might your vacation time be worse, relatively speaking, for whatever company? At least before your manager—who probably knows you’re a bridge-builder—could predict when you’d be out. Now it seems like you’d be much more unpredictable in your quest to avoid being useful (while being paid).