I wish I could say this instead of having to schedule my vacation time a month in advance.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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If your business requires all its employees to be there to function, it's understaffed.
People go on vacation, get sick, quit, have car trouble, and die. Your business needs to account for that.
So you're saying you failed to plan adequate staffing capacity for the company's needs?
Sounds like a planning issue on their side. Where I live, it's expected that some periods are just less busy because people like to take off those weeks.
"that's a shame, you should have considered it when you last downsized the workforce. I'll be back in a month"
This might be a US thing. I have worked in — what I consider — pretty unfulfilling jobs, but they usually still insist I take my vacation time and remind me to take breaks. Maybe it secretly came back in my performance review in obscure ways so I might also be an idiot.
The break reminder is just a legal obligation, they can still give you the stink eye when you say you're taking a break and brag about how long they've worked without a break.
I am about to no longer be able to take the bus because the company can't keep it's staff.
Literally me I was like.. WHO CARES
Yep. If you don’t want me to use it, don’t give it to me. I’ll be thinking about you on the beach. Not!
Sounds like a Management Skill issue
One of the only positive things about working at Amazon is they they're actually competent enough to hire enough employees to cover unexpected life events. No joke, they hand out over an hour of personal time every single day, enough to take an entire day off after barely working a couple of weeks.
I've been sleeping in nearly every single shift for a year straight, coming in late constantly, and management literally couldn't give a single fuck. They even let you come back from breaks late and no one says a damn thing. I once stretched out a 15 minute break to 45 minutes, and nothing came of it. So long as your work gets done on time it's no problem. They even fired the one manager who would actually do things by the book and get after employees. I couldn't believe it when it happened; it's almost too unbelievable to be true.
The best part is that you don't even have to call in; taking time off is done with an app and it always gets approved instantly. If the pay wasn't shit (only $19.50hr), I'd never want to leave.
Is this for office work? Because it doesn't jive with the totalitarian surveillance/micro management regime I've been hearing about at their warehouses and for their drivers.
Don't know the exact term but I work at a "last mile" warehouse, basically the place where already packaged items go to be sorted and put onto trucks for delivery. It's a smaller warehouse but it is a warehouse. All I do is sort packages.
And yeah I'm confused too. I avoided getting a job there for years because of all the horror stories. But my experience has been quite the opposite. Even the notorious "suicide booths" aren't what the news makes them out to be. They're literally just a phone booth.
IDK maybe my warehouse is just different. I have no idea.
Reading about it a bit more, they also try to drive their office employees as hard as they can but it's not as effective because of the smaller labor pool and nature of the work.
And congrats to you for finding a nice place!
My job is IT. Staffing is your job.
Do some people actually get these messages? It sounds almost illegal. I get emails from management moaning at me for not using my annual leave and reminding me to take them before they reset.
I've worked in a small company's small team of 3 devs before, it would not have been great for the company if two or all of us went on a holiday at the same time.
I’ve had companies write clauses in their employee manual which states you must apply and get approval for using your paid vacation days a month in advance. When you sign the contract, you agree to these rules.
The thing is, where I live, there is no requirement to receive approval, and you really only need to give one day of notice (which has precedent in court). The use of these days off if the employee’s legal right.
The really shitty thing is that companies can legally write illegal clauses in their contracts, they just can’t enforce them. However, if an employee is young and doesn’t know their rights, they will just follow the rules blindly (I know I did).
Also, leave only accumulated for two years here, so you have to use it or lose it.
So the moral of the story is to educate yourself on your local labor laws.
In the US there's basically no legal requirements for paid leave so there's also little to no protection for it
land of the free (for corporations)
Sometimes managers do guilt trip.
Shitty manager: "Oh you're taking a few days off to go to a funeral? Now Sarah has to work overtime... :-("
A dumb employee would then try to reduce your PTO time to make it work, because they're too stupid to realize that it's the manager's responsibility, not theirs.
Oh, and the manager is paid significantly more than them.
Your leave resets? That sounds illegal.
Use it or lose it is very common, even in (US) government employment.
US having laws that permit wage theft? Colour me entirely unsurprised.
Vacation time is not the same as hourly wage.
Where I live, failing to give people their legally-mandated annual leave would be no different to failing to pay them their salary. If they resign or are let go, you have to pay out their annual leave (one day of annual leave = one day of extra pay).
They can reasonably instruct you to use your leave if it's building up too much (but what's "reasonable" or "too much" are not specifically legally defined), but they cannot just take it away. Annual leave is literally part of your legal entitlements.
That's cool, and I'd love to see it. "wage" means hourly payment for time worked. Anything else is a benefit or whatever - but not wage. Wage theft is not getting paid wages due.
I'm not going to deny that that might be true in some US states' laws. But it is not true morally or philosophically. From the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on wage theft:
Wage theft is the failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law.
Later in the same paragraph, it includes as an example:
not paying annual leave or holiday entitlements
It is pretty uncontroversial that not paying overtime bonus rates is wage theft, and that article goes to great lengths to describe how misclassification (e.g. classing someone as a contractor when they are in fact a direct employee) is wage theft not just philosophically, but at times in the US legally.
Here in Australia, a classic example of wage theft that we hear about companies getting fined for a lot is failure to pay superannuation. A US equivalent to that might be if they failed to pay into a 401k contribution match when their employment contract stated they would. It's not "wage" per se, but it is part of the agreed compensation for work.
Leave entitlements are no different. Whether the law recognises it correctly or not, taking away people's annual leave is wage theft.
Yes, yes we do. I've recieved them personally
Had a boss that refused to give me full time cause that would cost company more money, but would harass me if I ever called out. Would remind him that he refused to make me full time and didn't give me a raise that year so I sure as hell wasn't driving through a blizzard to come to work a night when I hadn't been scheduled until 15 minutes before he called.
Translation: We're extremely short staffed, so we are shaming our employees into sacrificing their vacation
Oh hey it's my old work
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