Office Culture, Work Spaces and Unions

I mean, I'm going to have to disagree. That is, where the law requires that you provide employees with paid time off, that is for the employees benefit. It's not reasonable for the employer to be able to choose to use that up for their benefit and to hell with the employees' needs or interest. Particularly where it can be decided with short notice. If it didn't take from the same pool, that would be a different matter, but de facto having to not use holidays until things roll over because an employer could decide it needs you to use them at any point is not a good outcome.

At least in France, it's from a specific pool of employer-controlled time off and, if the employer doesn't use it within a specific time frame, it's added to the regular pool of leave days. Btw, I think it's happened once to me in a dozen years of employment.

See, that one I just find weird in the sense of why there's a specific pool for it. Just seems a more convoluted way to handle things.

My company does it, but it's reserved for like, when there's renovations or a full server upgrade and the company can't open. It's basically "we can't open today, it has nothing to do with you, we'll pay you anyway."

The other thing is that the company doesn't have a "use it or lose it" clause with vacation time. You schedule it yourself or you get stuck with most of February off because you have to use a year's vacation time by the end of February of the next year. And since we're in Canada, February's usually pretty miserable.

At my office, we have paid vacation days and can carry them over between several years (except for a couple “personal leave” days that you use or lose within the fiscal - I think those exist because they’re a thing that can be added on to sweeten the deal during union contract negotiations, without them being able to be bankedavross multiple years). There’s an upper limit to how many vacation days a person can carry across years, so at some point we do need to use them.

There are no official restrictions on when we can take our vacation time; a person just needs to discuss it with their supervisor and get their permission to make sure they’re not away during a busy time, and that there aren’t too many people away at the same time.

“Sandwich leave” sounds horrible and unjust.

I’m stunned to hear that Britain has a 4-week minimum vacation time? Like, do you mean that every business needs to offer that? That would be AMAZING. I just hit 4 weeks vaction/year now, 8 years into a really good job.

Edited by Galadriel on Mar 30th 2024 at 8:51:51 AM

28 days is actually over 5.5 weeks (because it's based on a 5 day work week). It's pretty much in line with what we have across the Channel, with a minimum of 25 days (and usually more as compensation for not reducing the actual work time when it went down by law). And that's not counting holidays or sick leave (lumping the latter with personal time off sounds outrageous to me, btw).

Yup. 5.6 weeks working, specifically (five working weeks + three days).

My job starts at 30 and goes up to 35 after five years, I think, so that's not bad. A guy I work with just straight up took all of December off.

Edited by RainehDaze on Mar 30th 2024 at 4:14:39 PM

My job starts at an accrual rate of half a day per two week pay period and Federal holidays. It increases to three quarters after three years and then to a full day at 15 years service (I'm 1.5 years off from that). So if you're just starting you get 13 leave days per year at your choosing and 11 days of paid holidays (was 10 when I started, but they added Juneteenth about two years ago), for a total of 24 days or 4 weeks and 4 days, about less than half of it are decided for you. And I thought I had it good with 23 days off to start.

For the most part, we get a lot of leeway to decide when we take our vacation days, unless it coincides with mission critical events. We're only allowed to hold about 240 hour (30 days) of leave transferred per year. Any vacation time that is not used by the end of the first pay period that ends after the start of the year is gone.

There's also travel and overtime leave allowances. If you have to travel for work, time spent towards travel outside your normal work hours counts towards travel leave (with certain criteria of what counts towards travel time), which you can use like your annual accrual. You have one year from when you accrued it to use, otherwise you lose it and don't get any compensation for it. Overtime work, you have either the option of overtime pay or comp time leave. Overtime pay is some graduated step calculation where at certain pay grades, you lose your overtime multiplier. If you go for the comp time option, you get additional leave, like travel leave, with the added benefit that if you don't use it, you get the hourly overtime pay rate of hours lost at the time of accrual.

In my case (I don't know about generally), it doesn't roll over—it's use it or lose it. But it's also not something that builds up over time, it's just "yup, here's your time for the year, do what you want". Does lead to a lot of people just doing half days or four day weeks towards June (no I don't know why they're counting from June) to use up any leftovers.

For comparison I’m 5 years into what’s considered a good job for benefits (pay isn’t great though), I have 30 days paid annual leave (started at 25) plus 8 public holidays paid and 1 extra employer based paid day off. Alongside that I also get flexi working where if I choose to do any hours above my 37 for the week I can save that time and use it to finish early one day or even take an entire extra day off. If my boss wants me to work extra hours then I get overtime at double time (regular overtime), 2.5 time (Saturday) triple time (Sunday and public holidays) plus if I have to work past 7pm I get time and a third. This can combine, so nighttime overtime on Sundays would get me 3.333 time.

Wow, Canada needs to get on this. This is the consequence of being used to comparing ourselves to the Americans rather than to Europe.

We do get overtime, and I have flex time options, and 15 sick days a year (which can be carried over between years), and 10 paid statutory holidays.

Edited by Galadriel on Mar 30th 2024 at 11:02:35 AM

No public holidays off for me except... I think Christmas and NY, so the usual suspects. But also start at a higher baseline, so it's probably more or less even in the long run.

Not counting the issues with the sandwich leave policy, my company does give a decent amount of leaves. 30 earned/ privileged leaves out of which 15 have to be consumed and the rest can be carried forward, 4-5 casual leaves all of which have to be consumed in the same year and 10-12 sick leaves that all get carried forward. Indian labour law I believe requires companies to provide a minimum period of earned leaves per month and that number changes state wise. Ofcourse in case of privileged leaves, you have to get it authorised beforehand and if you have the bad luck of your colleague is on leave at the same period, then you cannot apply as in my department at a time only one or two absent employees was acceptable. I do wonder why sandwich leave even is required when they have all other measures of authorisation for leave already placed. Is it to reduce cases of employees extending their leaves by more than a week or two midway due to unforeseen circumstances or change of plans.

As for overtime pay, it is applicable for contract workers and labour, whereas for management employees like me, nope. As far as management employees are concerned, I believe the reasoning is that if you are taking overtime beyond the standard 8 hours, it is completely at your own call, and they are not asking you to take overtime, and it is a reflection of your own skill in how much time you take to complete a task given. In my previous workplace, working atleast 1-2 hours more than the 8 hours was unofficially expected of you and the one before that was plain hell for how bad in time management and task assignment the upper management was.

For my position and those beneath me on the pay grade scale, overtime is hard limited to about a quarter of your hours in a single pay period. As for overtime pay, there is a hard upper limit on what you are allowed to be paid in overtime where you get a multiplier. If your overtime is less than that limit, you get 1.5 base pay rate for your hours. If you're overtime pay after the multiplier reaches that limit, you just get that limit. If your base pay without the multiplier is greater than that limit, you just get your base pay. So once you make enough money, your overtime pay is just your normal pay. There are also other modifiers like premium pay if you work outside the standard work hours as part of your job, such as working in night hours, Sundays or Holidays which are modifiers to the base pay rate when not working overtime, but I don't pay that much notice, because that doesn't often come up in my job. Usually it's just travel on weekends which falls under travel leave rules.