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
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u/Luutamo 1d ago
I think this comic might be too American for me to understand