Less than half of U.S. workers use all their vacation days
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Obviously this varies from place to place, but I believe the practice was pretty widespread in silicon valley at least. And this was one of the justifications for companies moving to “unlimited” PTO policies - employees weren’t reporting PTO diligently, and they didn’t like having to pay people out when they left.
Unlimited PTO is a scam.
Do I skip the 4th of July beach trip so I can have an extra three days around New Year's? Should we leave on a Friday to visit the grandparents, or should I save that day in case I need it in the fall?
And in December, suddenly half of my coworkers realize they have two weeks left to spend 9 vacation days they didn't think about, that won't roll over and get paid out - and now, it's me and one other person having to split the on-call shift to cover.
Give me unlimited PTO. I'll fight for it in a toxic workplace, and/or get another job.
You realize there is no such thing, right?
Took a boring corporate job with 25 days plus a lot of extra time for sick family, 3 months of paternity leave, and lots more holidays.
Official Unlimited PTO is a scam because of how easy it is to abuse in toxic workplaces. It’s a shortcut for saying there’s no minimum and you can take vacation when everything is caught up (nothing is ever caught up).
And forcing people to take PTO (especially in 2+ week chunks) is also a good thing for the company: it helps the company identify and fix single points of failure in their employees skills and knowledge.
A toxic workplace can make fixed PTO just as miserable as unlimited PTO if they want to, and vice versa
Many employers give 5. It accrues if you don’t take it.
Do you actually prefer the gratuitous cognitive dissonance of calling it "unlimited" when everyone knows it isn't (and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc)?
how do you come up with this number though. If its a set number like that then why not make that official PTO.
If it's a set number then usually you need to worry about how many days you have accrued. So you are not able to take 1 day PTO until you've worked for a few weeks. Or you might have trouble scheduling time off early in the year having used most of your allowance around the holidays. Unlimited means the system is flexible.
Honestly as a software engineer I feel like my days "on" are close to many people's days "off" anyway. So days off just meant I could travel.
I got a job offer from a company that offered unlimited PTO a few months back and wish I had accepted and then given that a shot.
Edit: If you’re downvoting me because “of course unlimited doesn’t mean unlimited”, you’ve just stumbled across the reason why unlimited PTO policies are nonsense.
Oh right, it's not actually "unlimited" by any definition of the word because you'd be fired ten times over for taking all the year off.
1: and it is not likely you'll be rehired if you haven't done any work
Then in classicial logic, a contradiction can imply anything: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion Therefore he can be fired 0,1,2,10,100,1000 times, with all those possibilities being true simultaneously.
People who think of their time off in terms of monetary value often see it that way, but if the problem you're trying to solve is less like "how to I maximize the value I accrue from this job" and more like "how can I make time for all the things I want to do with my life", doing away with the nickel-and-diming scarcity feeling which comes from rationing out and accounting for a limited number of PTO days can make it much easier to actually use and enjoy time away from work.
Conversely, I just came from an employment situation with unlimited PTO. After an especially long project, I took three solid weeks off to recover. This gave the CEO pause, but it was in alignment with our policy, I was grateful, and, I think, the company benefitted significantly from my efforts while I was available!
No real point to make here, I suppose. Just sharing a varied experience.
I have seen that the manager lets it slide but behind the scenes "keeps record" and it shows up in your performance report. This usually happens when the manager is under pressure themselves and needs to find a scapegoat. Who better to scapegoat that the undocumented PTO taker.
When we're talking about this "nice check when you leave" - what does that money represent? If you are taking more time off than your official policy it isn't compensation for working more hours than expected.
If you aren’t reporting your PTO, your “unused PTO” doesn’t go down and you can still get paid for it when you leave.
This was many years ago, but I still remember when my manager came by my desk and said “don’t ever submit another PTO request again. I trust you to take as much personal time as you need and still do a great job.” It made me feel valued and respected, which to me was a lot more important than the small cash bonus when I finally did leave (I eventually left when that company was acquired and found that the new company did not value their employees as much).
If companies cared about getting employees to take time off, they would force a minimum. "Take 4 weeks off each year, and if you don't we will turn off your access card and vpn access in December."
I don’t believe in the concept of unlimited PTO (usually disadvantages the worker), but I’m fine playing along when it’s their dime and they’re calling the tune.
I won't really categorically disagree. But, if I'm hanging in my hotel room and surfing or whatever, if I can point someone in a direction or answer a quick question, I'm not sure that's wrong. I assure you I'll go back to my book-reading or movie-watching right after.
We’re not saving lives, we’re just moving bits.
Edit @ghaff: Love the CEO anecdote in your reply, I’d work for that person! Priorities set properly.
Though to your C-suite comment, an engineering director at a fairly high profile SV company was telling me that they hired a senior comms person who just couldn't deal with the fact that the CEO would take vacations where they literally unplugged--and ended up quitting.
> The FDIC endorses the concept of a vacation policy that allows active officers and employees to be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of no less than two weeks. During this time, their duties and responsibilities should be assumed by other employees. This basic control has proven to be an effective internal safeguard in preventing fraud. In addition, such a policy is viewed as a benefit to the well-being of the employees and can be a valuable aid to the institution's overall training program.
It gives a nice incentive for a company to really care that they leave no man/woman behind.
...
[ GONE FISHIN' ]
Maybe one week of actual vacation a year, it takes time to plan and money to actually go anywhere. And then you need a staycation after to recover from the "vacation" anyway.
Bigcorp though.
With very minimal effort you can literally have an effective 25% rebate on all flights.
Let me put it this way, you might get a 25% cashback on a 1000 flight, but there might be a 500 flight alternative from another lowcost competing airline which you didn't even consider or knew it existed due to their points moat or whatever
You're basically giving your money away to the airline to keep, instead of having it in your bank account.
It's not real money, if the airline goes bankrupt tomorrow do you have your points?
[0] - https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/more-than-you-want-to...
Remarkable how little vacation allowance the US gets. No wonder only around a 3rd of Americans own passports.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2015/11...
The US also has a ton of attractions within its borders. And other than going to Canada or Mexico, you're talking about relatively expensive flights to travel internationally.
As does everywhere, which is why people travel.
You should checkout flights to Cancun or the Caribbean. Even South America is cheap, and flights from the East Coast (of North America) to Europe are a few hundred bucks.
If what you were saying had any merit, surely Australians and New Zealanders wouldn't explore outside their country much.... but they do in droves.
To be clear I've traveled internationally a lot. But I also understand why fewer Americans are inclined to do so than someone who lives in a small European country who might drive across a border.
I’m actually traveling to Europe in about a week but it’s about $1K.
No, we established that flights to Cancun and the Caribbean are extremely cheap, and flights to Europe can be had for the same price as flights to the far coast of North America.
Travel in Europe is expensive when you're there so a lot of people from Europe travel to SE Asia and similar destinations (althought the cost differential is reducing)
You're not finding flights in the US between major cities for less than 3 digits, and buses take several hours. In Europe you take a 2 hour bus ride and end up in a completely different country whichever way you go.
There's a reason your stereotypical university student backpacker goes to Europe.
That's 'nuts', why's that? If £12 short haul flights between cities works in Europe why not in the US? Obviously the US is a lot bigger than the UK, but so's Europe, I could book a flight right now for today to (checks) Ibiza for £9.99, Milan or Barcelona for £12.99, and so on. Why's it 10x that (actually 29x for today, but ae little as 5x (mid two digits) if we push the date out and go mid week, call it 10x, whatever) for NY to Chicago? Naively I would think within one country it should be possible to run it if anything even cheaper.
In any case I’m hundreds of dollars to fly in the US.
It just adds up to a lot of competition among no-frills airlines because there's a sizable group of price-sensitive travelers who are fine with talking a budget flight for an hour or two.
I meant the total cost in Europe. Food, accommodation etc.
Looking at my bookings in northern Europe and US major cities, they're also roughly the same price, but there's a lot more cheap hostels in Europe if you're willing to go that route.
Southern Europe is cheaper by over 50% though.
Interesting how we could come to basically opposite conclusions given the same data.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/01/11/the-sh...
I have used each passport exactly 1 time in the last 20 years, once to the British Virgin Islands and once, recently to Vietnam.
But I keep one handy because the process to get one is months and frankly, there may be scenarios where you may want to leave the country without months of beurocratic delays first.
Our PTO year runs from 1 April, so the only (unwritten) rule about vacation is that we should try to spread it over the year. This is because we're only allowed to carry over 5 days to the next year, not taking PTO is frowned upon, and HR don't want everybody to be using up their PTO at the same time at the end of the year.
A few days ago we had a Zoom town-hall meeting where our CEO thanked everybody for taking time off.
Generally you'd have a similar amount of time off here, 4-5 weeks, and it would run April-April as you said for your own.
The biggest difference is that you must take two consecutive weeks at least once a year.
That said there are pluses I think I'm allowed to stay home to care for a sick child 11 days a year, paid. That's a nice bonus, and it has been useful as a parent. When our child was a baby, or toddler, sickness mostly meant that he stayed asleep all day and was lethargic and quiet. Now he's older there's no chance that I'd be able to work from home and take care of him, so those days come in useful. (Helps that I get my 11 days, and my wife gets a similar amount too.)
Otherwise it feels like most Finnish people take a month off in the summer, to the extent that a lot of shops/places in the city close down due to no staff, so there's often a bit of negotiation within teams about who can be away, to make sure there is cover. But it feels pretty relaxed and friendly.
I had this in the UK when I worked in finance. As I recall the two-week rule was commonly written into employment contracts in banking. There was some FCA guidance around this, possibly in the wake of the Jérôme Kerviel scandal (I am not sure, it's been a while).
The idea was to make it a harder for a single rogue trader to perpetrate fraud as they would have to collude with someone to look after their books while they were out for two weeks.
In reality I take a lot of time off, there’s days where I literally will just report at a standup meeting and then do nothing else, while I go off and do something fun. This is “lite” PTO. I don’t mind if I have to answer the occasional slack message to keep up the appearance of a busy person.
To me, reporting a day where I just don’t feel like doing anything as time off seems like a waste of a PTO day. I’d rather use official PTO for when I travel to some place far and will really be completely unavailable if anyone should try to reach me. This is “deep” PTO.
I think it’s kind of a shame and I’d like to go back to split PTO and sick time
"unlimited time off" means it's not accounted for at all. You basically play unaccounted hooky at will and whether you get away with it depends on how cooperative your team/management is.
Finance is totally oblivious because it's not a "benefit" part of your compensation package anymore. HR only hears about it when you didn't get away with it and management is building a case for firing you.
It leads to an obfuscation of the data over time, I think.
Understanding the inherently undocumented ad-hoc nature of the "unlimited time off" scam makes it pretty obvious IMO.
Remember, HR isn't there for you, it is there to help the company.
But they have some limits after which it becomes government or individual insurance.
What's the benefit compared to having a single bucket?
Sick days aren’t vacation for me. I’m generally too depressed or manic to function. I’ll usually drive to a park or the local zoo to walk so I’m not sitting in a chair, too anxious or tired to get up. Somehow that’s “vacation” time because I’m able to (or need to) leave my house.
If you're disabled/chronically ill you maybe be able to use intermittent FMLA (in the US) to take more sick time but this is unpaid and can be a big hassle, esp if your employer/doctors are not supportive/cooperative (which can be a result of incompetence/ignorance as easily as malice)
I have routine procedures that require 2 days just for the procedures. Then a half day for travel. The hospital is 2.5 hours away. One of those days is a prep day so I don't venture to far from the hotel.
And this is a yearly occurrence. Now if I have an acute episode that is a 3 day stay (at a local hospital). Which, luckily this only happens every other year or so.
Basically if I take any time off that is true vacation days I have to make sure I have plenty of days on the books in case I get sick or know I will be having to make doctor appointments in the next few months.
I think the unlimited time off loophole damages the sick time more than actual vacation, as others have pointed out in this thread, which is the real shame.
The first company I worked for out of college had this policy. Ironically, they were lauded in the press at the time as they had some of the most comprehensive health coverage for workers and all of their dependents. Cadillac plans at zero payroll deductions to the employees regardless of family size.
The end result is me spending a week or more per month being barely functional. I’m at my desk, poking at code I don’t have enough brain power to understand. But, better to “work” than get in trouble for not being visibly at my desk.
As far as diseases go I guess I'm fairly fortunate. I don't have to manage it day-to-day but it is always in the back of my mind.
If I had known in my teens and 20s I'd end up with this type of disease I'd have done drugs and raw dogged some hookers, at least I'd be able to point to a reason for having a bad liver. /s
If you separate out vacation and sick time, then employees need to lie to use all of their time off.
This was historically mostly not a problem. People took vacation and they used sick time if they needed to (including I'm sure for the occasional hangover). Sick time wasn't "your" time to use up in the normal course of events. But it was there if you needed it. Sick time was never viewed as a benefit to maximize any more than health insurance was.
Pooling them still leads to a "sucks to be you if you need to take a lot of sick leave." I guess that you can argue that's not the company's problem. But to me that's a generally un-empathetic attitude.
Lets say a worker has nominally 10 days off per year. What the company does practically is if you take more than 6 days off is start writing you up. Theoretically you could take 10 days but any infraction would result in termination. The practice ensures employees are always dismissible for cause unless they don’t use vacation days.
Not all companies use such tactics on their workforce, but enough do to make it a systematic problem.
Mandatory payout at 100% for unused PTO, and a ban on use-or-lose would be a good start.
I thought it was "just" about toxic culture but this reads like there are quite concrete methods of coercion at play.
This happened to an in-law who works for a soft drink distributor, but this kind of thing happens often in decent wage but lower end jobs, the 20-40/hr range.
At the high end it’s more workaholics or people looking to get promoted. On the lower rungs it’s coercion and games by HR to manage people out and claw back vacation days.
I forget how dystopian the US is at times.
Here in the UK, I get 28 days PTO per year. I can carry forward up to 5 days into the next year. But once you've done that once, you're pretty much committed to taking at least 28 days off the next year, because it's not really acceptable (from a company perspective) to lose PTO. We're strongly encouraged to spread the time off over the year, and to use up our allowance. Anybody here that only took 10 days per year would be having a chat with HR about healthy work/life balance.
I genuinely struggle to understand how it's possible to have anything like an enjoyable existence with only 10 days off per year. I mean, that's all your PTO gone for only a single 2 week vacation. Not even a single spare day for a duvet day.
Sure if you're sick you shouldn't work, and on average most people are probably healthy enough that they lose 1-3 days a year, maybe a few people lose a week or two, but it just seems wrong that somebody could be fired for being too sick, or be forced to work because they've used their allowance.
In the UK I've been off sick for several months at one point in my career, and while I started to lose money pretty quickly at least I knew that I'd not get fired, and would/could return happily.
(Where I live now I'm allowed around 11 days, paid, to stay home to take care of a sick child. That's a pretty nice bonus, though I remember last year I was trying to count the days up to see how close we were .. covid must have used a week, twice, and then the standard child-sickness that go in waves at daycare/preschool/school.)
They can be stricter (forcing all time to be taken) in finance.
Of course any employer not in Montana can simply terminate anyone at anytime for no reason, but then there is no reason to write up anyone.
Rinse. Repeat.
But then I got angry, and thought: "Why aren't these people forming unions and going on general strikes? They used to do it in the late 19th century... that's how they got the 8-hour working day."
And then I remembered that:
1. large existing US unions are often either corrupt or decrepit
2. US culture is horribly anti-worker
3. US corporations do almost everything to disrupt unionization efforts. Years back they would do absolutely everything including hiring mercenaries/saboteurs like the Pinkerton people
... so I need to cut them some slack.
Anyway, my suggestion is to maybe try the wobblies:
Also, if you get sick on vacation you get that time back as well. [2]
[1] https://www.ch.ch/en/work/working-hours/rest-periods-and-bre...
[2] https://www.ch.ch/en/work/working-hours/vacation--public-hol...
That’s how it is in the US for minors (at least in my state), you have to take a 15 minute break every four hours (and work a absolute max of 40 a week). Used to drive me nuts when I had an internship and was in the middle of something.
(Yes, I have a working problem. Why do you ask?)
It made total sense given my medical circumstances, but the whole concept blew my mind (even our HR system didn't have a way to record it).
1 week spring break.
1 week to take kids someplace enriching over the summer.
1 week to take to beach so they can see the ocean and all that.
1-2 week travel for holidays (thanksgiving and Christmas breaks for us)
Right there bare minimum 4 weeks of leave just when school is out and trying to have the kids see the world.
Many of our kids classmates travel far more (months in summer, long weekends to ski or beach randomly).
This is the main reason I dislike unlimited PTO policies.
I've also only had 4 jobs in the last 35+ years.
It was not unusual that I would assign vacation days to people who didn't use their vacation days and had reached the limit and stopped accruing vacation.
We figured assigning vacation days was better than than have them miss out on days off / get burnt out.
It was a good place to work, good people, the folks who just didn't take vacation just ... didn't. They didn't mind getting it assigned either, we always talked about it first.
That said I'm also known people who really just didn't care to travel for the most part and got bored hanging around the house. (Though in that case, the strategy should probably be to just taking Friday's off.)
Another guy just wanted to be at home with his horses and have time off when the kids were out of school ;)
By having more PTO, each day becomes less valuable and the threshold for using a day falls back into the stuff of normal human life.
"Gov. Pritzker Signs Historic Legislation Guaranteeing 40 Hours of Paid Leave
Governor JB Pritzker today signed SB208 into law, making Illinois the third state in the nation, and the first in the Midwest, to mandate paid time off to be used for any reason. The historic legislation provides employees with up to 40 hours of paid leave during a 12-month period, meaning approximately 1.5 million workers will begin earning paid time off starting in 2024."
Your attitude really isn’t something to be proud of.
1/ How do Asian countries with their standard 50-65 hour weeks manage burnout?
Before you reach for external statistics like birth rate, suicide rate, etc. I am saying workers have the choice of converting their time to cash instead of the current system where workers do not get to choose how many hours they work.
Taiwan - 50-60 hours is common [0] S. Korea - current limit of 52 hours [1] and with some jobs averaging 46hr/wk [2].. China - 996 (9a-9p; 6 days per week)[3] Japan - 1/4 work 80 hours of overtime per mo [4]
2/ There are many people approaching retirement age with months of PTO saved up. They will use this PTO to retire months early (keeping them on employer health insurance longer).
How do retirees fit into the paradigm of you _need_ to take at least X weeks of vacation, or you will be burned out?
[0] - https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=897 [1] - https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/18/asia/south-korea-longer-work-... [2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/689757/south-korea-avera... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system [4] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/japan-has-some-of-the-longes...
Taking a week off means somehow having to find a very expensive and adequate replacement for that time. Unfortunately, that's a lot more hassle than it's worth. Honestly, it's easier to just stick to the routine than try to take time off.
I'm surprised that such data wasn't included in the Pew Research poll that the article cites. They seemed to have gotten a good cross section of the economy.
[0] https://www.aarp.org/ppi/info-2020/caregiving-in-the-united-...
I simply cannot fathom a person who spends ~all of their life at work. I don't think a single year of my adult life has been spent with over 40 weeks at work, most of them have been 30 or even less.
I use unpaid time off a ton, the entire point of me earning more than minimum wage is that it's efficient so that I can work less.
And if people really don’t use that much time, then it’s a big win-win for companies, as there are huge financial advantages in “Flex PTO” for the company, which I’d guess is why many companies are transitioning towards it or have already implemented it.
-- or even worse somebody take your duties on and screws up then it's not just net zero it's net negative.
No chance am I making that mistake again
And runs people down, which raises indirect costs on all of us.