Richard Branson has made Virgin Management the latest of a handful of companies to offer employees “unlimited” paid vacation time. The idea is that these companies won’t track your hours as long as you get your work done. Which, as a binge worker, sounds pretty damn great me.
But “beware the implications of unlimited vacation,” warns Bloomberg Businessweek’s Vanessa Wong:
The glow of trust and togetherness that such policies provide could actually make employees less likely to take time off. Already, some 40 percent of American workers don’t use all their paid vacation days. Even away from the office, employees can still choose to be on their BlackBerrys (BBRY) for 168 hours a week (as the device’s marketing materials point out, to every worker’s distress). Abolishing official vacation days also means you can’t trade unused days for cash, or hoard them for 20 years and take a hard-won paid sabbatical before retiring.
Um… what century is Wong living in?
I’m 51 years old and have never stayed in one salaried job long enough to accrue more than two-weeks of paid vacation days a year, let alone hoard them for cash or sabbatical. Wait. I take that back. Last February, on my three-year anniversary at The Stranger, I qualified for a third week of paid vacation for the coming year. I was fired one month later.
And my penchant for job hopping isn’t so abnormal. The average worker today stays at one job for a median of 4.4 years—for Millennials, half that. So a national paid vacation standard that starts at two weeks and is tied to length of tenure ends up being cruel, counterproductive, and downright stupid. This is a policy that inevitably leads to burnout while distorting the labor market by punishing workers for switching jobs.
So I’m all for any policy that helps shake up America’s draconian attitude toward vacation days.
Also, most employers that issue PTO hours like pay have a limit on the maximum accrual, usually less than 6 weeks. Some of them even have forced PTO “shutdown” on an annual or more frequent basis, to “clear the books” of extra wages owed to employees in the form of PTO balances.
I worked at Cypress Semiconductor, a tech company with an office in Lynnwood, that did all of these things. They now have “unlimited” PTO, as does my new employer.
I am not afraid of taking lots of PTO, so it works for me, but I think on net it is worse for employees.
None of us Millenials work at a place for more than 2 years- for a variety of reasons, but mostly centered on lack of pay raises (it is pretty common knowledge that the only way to get a raise is to quit and get a new job, or hope for a promotion, though to get a promotion one has to wait what, 5-7 years? During that 5 years your pay gets eaten up by inflation)
What I see happening under this “flexible vacation time” is more time taken for errands, less for vacations, and and even greater emphasis on working 45-60 hours(without over time, of course) a week.
Want to know how great working for the state is? Let me explain. I hoarded sick leave, and when I retired, the state cashed it out at a 1:4 ratio: 1 day’s pay for 4 days of unused sick leave. Yes, we “underworked and overpaid” public employees had it cushy! We even were paid for 40 hours when we worked only 50 or 60 hours a week!
Try working in the HVAC a business and see how much “fun” it is to work in the private sector.
Goldy, if you’re doing a lot of changing jobs, you should definitely be doing a Roth IRA for yourself.
I didn’t have that problem wham I worked at a large financial institution in NYC. As a bank officer, I was required by law to take 2 consecutive weeks (of my 4 weeks available) vacation, every year. I had to physically be away from work, so that if I was doing anything underhanded with the computers or accounts there was a better chance of being caught.
(The only time I was even tempted was when a delivery guy got off the elevator on the wrong floor, ran into me in the hallway, and wanted me to sign for an envelope he had with him. When I asked what was in it, I was told it was $7.3 million in negotiable securities. I quickly tried to think of which countries don’t have extradition to the US, then told him what floor he really wanted…)
@6
Well, honesty is definitely the best policy!
“I was fired one month later.”
Probably the clearest statement anyone has made about the separation. Too bad there was no union to contest it, or better, to discourage such nonsense from autocrats like Dan S.
It’s all wage theft.
Glad to finally know the true circumstances about your departure from Slog. I figured, but didn’t want to assume. Ironically I find much less of interest to read on Slog and in The Stranger these days. There are so many new names and so much less depth to anything written that I can now go days without even checking Slog, whereas it used to be at least a once daily visit.
Al of my employers so far have had limits on the accrual of vacation days – for the long term employees it was usually 4-6 weeks of time. I remember a head honcho marching someone out the door when they were about to exceed their days, telling them not to come back until next week. There was discussion recently about moving to unlimited PTO, but the micromanaging boss was not fond of that idea and gave evidence that it would be a logistical nightmare to manage for HR and for production, so it was dropped. I don’t think anyone was too disappointed to see that happen.