There are usually 2 kinds of paid leave (Paid Time Off) in the US: sick and vacation. Sick leave is an allotment of days where you can call in sick and still get paid. Vacation leave is the same but for vacations.
Until recently, there was an expectation that when you leave a job, your unused PTO would get lumped into your last paycheck.
As you can imagine, corpos have started clawing back that money. This is also egregious since corpos do everything they can to deny that leave in the first place ("You're not sick, you can still work." "Someone already is taking off that week so you can't. No I don't care that you already paid for it.")
It's also worth noting that many white collar jobs are instituting "unlimited PTO" which means, by their description, you can take time off as you need.
What they don't specify is that you still need to get this PTO approved and it will only be approved as time allows.
And time never allows.
And since you aren't actually accruing PTO, there's no liability and nothing to pay out if the person leaves the company.
Also, on average, people take less time off with these policies. Even ignoring the problem with needing to request it, there's no guidance there on how much you can/should take off.
I live in the UK. Holiday here has a legal minimum but it's use it or lose it - it ensured that I actually take it off so it doesn't go to waste (I can carry over 5 days, per company policy). It's also a requirement that my employer allows me that time off - if I wanted to take all of December off they could tell me no, that's not reasonable, but they can't deny it all year long.
Holiday here has a legal minimum but it's use it or lose it
That seems illegal too? In Australia annual leave builds up, which usually is only a problem for those people who literally never take leave and have some sort of unholy balance and are forced to use it up so the company doesn't have to pay it out in a huge lump sum.
it’s legal, but if the company were found to be preventing staff from taking the statutory amount of leave, they would get in trouble. they’re obliged to allow you to take time off, they’re not obliged to actually force you to or to pay you a bonus in lieu of taking time off.
in practice most companies want to avoid even looking like they don’t let people take statutory leave, so they repeatedly and strongly encourage you to book it over and over again until you do.
I haven’t used up enough leave (I think it’s 70% by October?) so my boss is literally chasing me to book some. Not something a lot of Americans deal with I think.
Nope, your employer isn't obliged to allow rollover but they also have to give you a reasonable chance to take it off. If they don't then you can take action against them.
Many employers will force you to take time off to avoid any chance of accusations
which usually is only a problem for those people who literally never take leave and have some sort of unholy balance and are forced to use it
They rarely ever enforce that at large organisations I've found. I personally like to build my leave up and take a few months off. It takes too long to fly anywhere from here, waste half your holiday on travel if you only took a week. Like they can legally ask you to use it to the point there's like 6 weeks remaining I think, but I've never heard of HR actually forcing the issue, but I imagine it's different at smaller organisations.
The rules will differ country to country. My uncle had his accrue and when he was getting ready to retire he basically took a year long vacation before retiring. He'd given that company decades and they owed it to them so it was only fair.
not illegal at all (edit: in the US), unfortunately. in very few cases will PTO of any kind accumulate for more than a year. if you don't use up your PTO by the end of the (fiscal) year, the number of hours is just reset and you lose whatever you didn't use.
Here in Germany no, or ill say not to my knowledge which is based on my experience. Everywhere I worked at had different rules how they deal with overtime and vacation days, but in most cases it was: take time off. My vacation days were 35 with usually around 20-30 overtime days accumulated over the year, with a bunch of attempts to take time off but I kinda really liked the job and the last one to pick time off. Also cancelling it when projects needed more time. That also meant come December with all of its offical holidays id have 2-3 months off in one go (20 is 1 month, so 55 is already almost 3 months, plus all the holidays of which we got a ton around the time)
Huh, very interesting! I have really admired the German system for the amount of vacation time you get, honestly surprised to hear you can just lose it.
Its not really that you can lose it, I havent seen it once that it happened at least. You are just forced into using it, even if you are at the most troublesome time (project wise).
Overtime is a bit of a different topic since you have the option to pay it out or take it as vacation, but many companies I've seen stopped paying it out and instead force you to take vacation with it. I will say this could be seen negative or positive, but I think it's a positive thing to not encourage working yourself to death for extra money.
Every employer I've ever had will absolutely chase you up and remind you of the remaining holiday you have left to book. Particularly in the latter half of the year if you've got a fair bit left
My current job has a sort of vague expectation you'll spread it relatively evenly throughout the year, and it's semi frowned upon to take more than two weeks together without a good reason. They don't want people saving up loads and then half the business attempts to take most of December off because they "accidentally" forgot to use it
But if I know I've got a big holiday coming up in say, September, and I book that plenty in advance, nobody is going to be hassling me in May to book anything. Generally employers are flexible enough, within reason
There is a Canadian company that posts on tik tok that has unlimited time off but has a 3 week minimum on it.. Which is actually pretty cool. They actually want to give their staff the time they need.
Most unlimited pto scams are just designed to screw employees.
Yeah, as an accountant, them ensuring the 3 week minimum means they're still taking a liability and not just using it to avoid costs. That's more responsible.
They might *have* to give that 3 weeks by law, but it really depends on the province and the amount of time you have worked at that company. (2 weeks is the minimum across the country, but places like Saskatchewan starts at 3weeks)
And while that's better than most parts of the US 3 weeks off a year is still complete bullshit. If you add in holidays that's like maybe 8% of the year you're not working. 92% of the time you're stuck doing some bullshit you don't even care about because otherwise you'll die.
10 days is the legal minimum for most of Canada. Lots of places offer more though, I was able to negotiate to get 20 days to start at my current workplace and will be getting more at various amounts of years employed there. I also get to bank a weeks worth of OT to take off in the same calendar year, and every other week is a flex day so every other weekend is a long weekend.
Wish it paid better though :(
Edit: Forgot to mention, also 11(min)/13 Stat holidays per year at least in my province.
Damn, that's so messed up. My work does unlimited PTO but they don't hold it over your head like that. In fact, after folks weren't taking very much time off, they decided to institute at least one three- or four-day weekend per month (sometimes more, if there are relevant holidays) where the whole office is closed so employees will actually get time off without having to worry so much about covering work. I will admit we're a small team, so maybe it's easier to pull off, or maybe there's just less middle management nonsense to get in the way, but they're a rare, great company in the US.
Even without unlimited it isn’t great. My doctor needed me to take time off to recover from a chronic condition that was flaring up - he asked me to find a week where I could take off I said I found a good spot I can take off 4 days without disrupting the company. My boss wrote me a nasty email claiming I was faking being “sick”
Did you really think you could just take whatever amount of PTO you wanted and not need approval? Like you would just say "40 years of PTO see y'all later!"
No one actually thinks that, don't be absurd. But it's not unreasonable to think "oh, this has unlimited PTO where my last job maxed at 40 hours of PTO, so this means my yearly vacation can be a week and a half instead!" Or "oh thank God, I don't need to choose between getting and recovering from a major surgery or affording food".
You're one of those people who hears that some European country has unlimited sick leave and thinks "well then why doesn't everyone just claim they're sick for the entire year?" As if smarter people than you haven't already thought of that.
Why would they call it "unlimited" if they don't plan on even giving you any at all? The defense you're giving for it is an extreme that never happens.
What actually happens is people get no PTO at all.
It's like getting the choice of getting 3 weeks PTO or a "mystery box" which contains anywhere between 0 to actually infinity PTO. Do you honestly think the company would put infinity PTO in that box?
EDIT: and just to add, what "unlimited PTO" actually is is "discretionary PTO", and that doesn't sound as good to employees as "unlimited".
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u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand