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Comment by jwie | Hacker News Reader

There’s likely some nuance here.

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.

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You say "there's more nuance" but what I read here is "it's actually worse than that."

I thought it was "just" about toxic culture but this reads like there are quite concrete methods of coercion at play.

I meant more, it’s not like people aren’t using as much as they can. It’s that there’s some tactics used against workers.

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.

> 10 days off per year

I forget how dystopian the US is at times.

Agree. It's unbelievable from a European perspective.

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.

More like a one week vacation, if you're lucky. You're forgetting that most of us don't have separate sick leave so PTO has to get used for sick days, dr appointments, etc. My first company I worked for wouldn't let you take any time off unpaid until you were out of PTO, so if you got the flu and were out for a week, there goes half your yearly vacation.

You'd probably find HR require taking the legal minimum, 20 days, but the rest could be ignored if the employee refuses to take the time off.

They can be stricter (forcing all time to be taken) in finance.

I often feel the same - the thing that surprises me the most about American time off is people who say they're allowed XX days of sickness a year.

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.)

10 days of personal time off and 11 federal holidays. Basically 4 out of 52 weeks off a year. It's really not that dystopian.

Compared to 20 days off (minimum), and unlimited sick leave, plus holidays. Yes it is.

My PTO is in addition to bank holidays, which I think is the equivalent to your federal holidays. A quick count shows that there are 10 bank holidays in the UK this year. Whichever way you slice it, American workers are getting screwed.

And GP calling it "4 weeks" is, I think, a bit disingenuous given how those federal holidays are spread through the year and can't really be combined into consecutive weeks off.

It's very dystopian. National / bank / religious holidays etc shouldn't come out of your individual holidays.

No state is going to accept that terminating someone for using their accrued vacation is a legitimate for cause termination.

And is using all accrued vacation days ever expliticly mentioned as contributing towards termination reason or is something else used as a cover?

If they are getting written up for using accrued vacation days, I presume that is the reason being used for termination.

I read it as getting written up for minor infractions that otherwise would be overlooked. Clock in a minute late? Write-up. Clock out 2 minutes late without manager approval? Write-up. Skip a minor safety precaution that everyone skips as a matter of doing business? Write-up.

Rinse. Repeat.

Lol no. Assuming at-will employment, which is the vast majority of the US workforce, "using all your vacation days yearly" is not a protected class so they are absolutely able to fire you for it.

The significance of a for cause termination is to keep unemployment benefit insurance premiums low for the employer, because the terminated employee is made ineligible for unemployment benefits.

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.

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