also it's free to contact the local labor bureau or eeoe if you're fired for taking a vacation, they'll even help you with lawyers, mediators etc

If it collapses without you, then maybe it should be your company.

Is there an ending to that story? If I was in that situation, I would have ignored it all and then came back the day I said I'd come back and act like everything was normal, make up something about how my phone got broken or stolen or something.

At the very least I hope you tried to get unemployment or some such!

What beer company?

Damn, what did your union say?

That sounds like cut and dry wrongful termination. You should have sued, if not for rightful compensation then to make sure that they think again before they pull the same shit with other employees.

Business Bros love to run a boiler room enterprise that prints decals for the local dollar store and pretend they're going to be the next Steve Jobs.

Personally, I'm so sick of people saying "it's parody/satire!" That's on the same level as fucking with people, then laughing "it's just a prank, bro!"

There's so many garbage takes and smooth-brained people believing the dumbest shit now, despite having all collective human knowledge at our fingertips... If your super funny satire is indistinguishable from these, it adds absolutely nothing.

Also the name “privilege log”

And in this system, it is common courtesy to make effort to make sure your team has as few problems as possible from your absence. Of course it is also common courtesy that you are not contact for anything work related during your vacation time.

oh in america management requests you plan them early then ignores reality anyway.

it is with ‘skilled’ labor

sadly this pool keeps getting smaller and smaller

My previous employer in the US was pretty liberal with their time off policy. I would just submit a request, and my manager would approve or not approve. 100% of the time when they didn't approve, it was because the email had gotten lost in their in box, so I just pestered them about it. It was assumed that employees would check with project managers of projects they were on to make sure their vacations wouldn't cause problems for the projects - which basically just meant that I would tell my PMs that I was planning to take X days off about a month from now, and they would say "thanks for letting me know, I'll work that into the project schedule!"

you can pressure your employees with your vacation as leverage

Most places start asking for vacation requests a month or two out before schools do theirs. The US definitely keeps a tighter leash on vacation time than Europe. General US sick-time policy is an abomination.

In my industry, the standard is "unlimited" PTO/Sick for salary. You don't have a limit of what you can take, but it has to be OK'd by your manager. They expect you to take at least 4 weeks.

But if you leave, or they let you go, they don't have to pay you for time accrued.

Also, if you have children you have priority during school breaks for paied leaves.

This surprises me actually, it seems to have a built-in discrimination from the outset.

I've got little PhobosAnomalies at home, and my jobs over the years have taken me all over the place so school holidays haven't been a priority for me. That said, I wouldn't personally consider my need to have a week or two off in the school holidays or summer holidays as a priority, more just the same importance of everyone else. After all, having little'uns is mostly a choice (or sometimes, the choice isn't even available 😢) so it seems like a world of employment law hurt to grant the parents a higher level of priority than others.

That said, I ain't in Germany so it's a moot point really.

It’s just left up to the employers. My employer gives me 4 weeks paid vacation, with sick time being additional to that and they have never given me a hard time for taking time off, even with just a few days notice.

Yea, no. At my last job every project was constantly late because they kept over promising and clearly didn’t have enough people for what they committed to. I couldn’t even get a department meeting once a month for an hour because everyone was always “too busy”.

These projects always need everyone to commit to it like it’s a personal passion project because their goals are unreasonable. If they can’t handle someone being away for a day then the manager clearly cannot plan and/or the enployees need better training(in my case half of them were simply stubborn and ineffective on top of the questionable management). Sure, don’t take a week off right before a reasonably set deadline if the work’s not done but otherwise do whatever.

I had someone call me yelling because I was going to finish the job in exactly the amount of time I said it would take me, but I started a day late due to technical errors which made another project go over by a day(and that day I still stayed late to make sure things were done!). If you can’t take a day off then you also can’t be sick, and if managers don’t account for THAT obvious possibility then they are fucking stupid and awful managers, zero exceptions.

During a previous assignment, I was told that during the summer period I was going to be swamped with work, and I was asked, because I don't have kids, not to take a vacation in that period.
So I didn't and told them that I would take my vacation after the summer holiday period, in October. I told them this in May.

The summer period comes around, and it was the slowest period I had ever encountered. There was literally nothing for me to do. Meanwhile the project manager and a number of other people in my team, who had small kids, did take time off in the summer period. By the time it was October, the work had picked up again, and they complained that I was going to be on vacation in that period. The manager called me not a team player. I just told them that I held the fort when they told me to, and that I had communicated this vacation well ahead of time. They had had their relax time, now it was time for me.

I agree, I don't want to make things harder for my team members, but within reason. And what they asked of me wasn't reasonable.

Yes but a good manager will arrange a replacement for you after you inform them that you're putting in the PTO. It shouldn't fall on your shoulders.

If they can't find a replacement then they should hire more people and try to overstaff every single day so that there's always someone to cover. That's what my workplace does, and because of that there has never been an issue with me taking PTO whenever the hell I feel like it.

I think managers like you are important for helping cultivate perspectives that are better situated to challenge various bullshit under capitalism. Whilst some workplaces or managers actively make it difficult for people to take their earned vacation days, there are also plenty of places that will apply a passive pressure that causes people being disinclined to take time off. Working in the first kind of place can make you more vulnerable to the insidiousness of the second workplace.

Sometimes, in that second kind of workplace, when you insist on taking your vacation days, the pressure morphs into more overtime coercion, but often, there ends up being no repercussions — often, they don't want to fight people on it, so they rely on workers effectively oppressing themselves.

The more people that are practiced at taking what they're entitled to, the easier it is to resist shitty workplaces that try to deny us what few privileges our contracts entitle us.

If the business can’t continue without any one person, then the business isn’t sustainable as-is and that’s not fair to anyone. Hire more people if it’s coverage or train your people if there’s skill gaps. Documentation of systems and processes is also crucial.

This is it, and not only for PTO reasons. Anyone can get in an accident, get sick or resign at any time. As a manager you just cannot depend on a permanent all-hands-on-deck situation where everyone just works like a cog in the machine (as in, if one cog is missing the whole machine is down).

Running a company like that is terrible practice and a disaster waiting to happen.

Always keep the bus factor in mind (as in "how many people can get hit by a bus before the project grinds to a halt?") and plan accordingly.

My department has been complaining to the big boss that we need more people. People have been retiring for years with barely one new hire per two empty positions. And now… I am in long term sick leave (protected) and shit is coming dooooown. Not enough people to cover all the projects. Multiple projects put on hold for the time being, others being roughly merged. People are pissed.

What do you mean I can't get by with a just-in-time workforce? I need a 100% deduction on my taxes (business and personal) or else I might faint!

It's not just the last decade. Office Space came out 25 years ago! We're more connected now, but this ridiculous work culture in the US has existed since at least the 1980s.

I'm glad we have some balance here in Europe.

Our org has a response division with a couple of teams on rotation. So long as you give them notice, you can take whatever you like off whenever you like - as the meme says, it's an organisational problem to manage, not the employee. The only exception is Christmas where the period from say the 21st to the 3rd January, where it's always massively oversubscribed so any PTO requests get put into a hat and drawn in September.

they contacted me during my vacation to beg me to work

Whereas that is bollocks, I would absolutely negotiate terms and see what they'd offer first! Might be a nice little earner if you didn't have plans after all.

It does depend on the size of the company. If it’s a small business, it may have no leeway occasionally, and you may need to time your PTO.

Really? Really though? Because unless I'm a part owner with a substantial stake, fuck all the way off with that boot licking nonsense. Capital is not your friend. They are not your family. A small business is at best like a cute little bear cub, that will maul you to death without a moment's remorse when it is bigger.

"Hard work" is one of the cultural norms that the Puritans instilled in our society. Our ancestors fought hard to form labor unions and to guarantee that we wouldn't have to work 80-hour weeks, and yet here we are.

Not to say that people in other countries don't work hard. They do. Many work harder than their counterparts in the US. But their governments have (very reasonable) limits on the amount of time their employers can expect them to work. (As well as minimums for time off, sick leave, etc.)

It's a weird holdover of American culture that spending too much time at work and putting the company's needs before your own is somehow virtuous.