>> As you said, different months have different lengths anyway, so it's not like an end-of-the-world problem, but for someone in that situation, they will none-the-less be losing money as a result of the change.
No, they're not really losing money, it's more like they're losing the opportunity to make money on that missing day. So a freelancer can, for example work in an extra day that week if they choose.
Public Holidays have the same effect every year, especially in countries where the actual day of the holiday follows the date, and thus in some years falls on a weekend.
Actually they've chosen to shorten a month which has 31 days to 30 days, which is no different than say April, June, September or November. So, by your measure they're being shorted for at least 5 months of every year anyway.
Plus, they've done it between Christmas and New Years, which in the Southern Hemisphere is the middle of the summer holidays. So pretty much no-one is working anyway.
The opposite way of looking at the same data is that they get a "free day" in every 31-day-month. And one of these "free days" is being discarded.
In other words, only us programmer types would try and nit-pick the thing apart. People on the ground haven't "lost" anything really.
My point about the contracts is that nothing is affected. Contracts that say "days" mean days, contracts that say months mean "months". This is built into contracts already because months aren't the same length. a 30 day December is no different to a 30 day April.