Feels like the time to lay out the details of this particular quid pro quo was before the contract was signed. It’s one thing to talk about a “performance culture” or lay claim to that old chestnut “work hard, play hard” but that rarely boils down to actually telling a starry-eyed graduate “Yeah you’ll make bank, but when your beloved granny dies, don’t even bother asking for time off. I had to attend my mum’s funeral by Zoom from the Caymans and I hardly ever cry about it now”
Sure, you can get intermittent FMLA - but there is someone at my job who has a horrendous attendance record.( like 33 unscheduled absences in a year). She does not have any sort of FMLA because her doctor will not complete the paperwork for her , presumably because she does not meet the qualifications of having a serious health condition. Understand , I’m not saying she’s faking illness - but she tends to be out a day or two at a time for various unrelated ailments * and that won’t qualify as a serious medical condition under FMLA. There’s no Federal law that requires employer to give any paid or unpaid leave in that situation.
- Two days here for a sore throat, a day there for backpain, another couple of days for an upset stomach and so on. We have sick and vacation leave, so she gets paid ( although in 10 years I don’t think I’ve seen her take a vacation) but if she worked somewhere that didn’t provide sick and vacation time, she would have been fired long ago since she’s not entitled to FMLA.
Yeah, my understanding is that Intermittent FMLA is only for one specific diagnosis.
[quote=“Stanislaus, post:101, topic:955461”]Feels like the time to lay out the details of this particular quid pro quo was before the contract was signed.
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I doubt that would have helped. People tend to be blinded by dollar signs during signings; it’s later you get the whole Cousin Vinny-style “You were serious about dat?” reaction. Indeed, the narrative pretty much states the Youtuber (Erika Kullberg, iyi) had resigned herself to similar demands as part of the gig, until that point.
Off topic, but $50k is a shit ton of money for clothes. A fifth of her compensation is in clothing? Is she an attorney for Louis Vuitton or something? How many $2000 grey suits does a lawyer need?
Of course employers can “win” on that one. Now maybe this particular attorney works some very high profile cases where they need her team to swoop in and deal with a time sensitive issue. But more than likely, it’s probably just typically “big white shoe law firm grinding hours out of new associates”.
Joni probably took a few acid trips to Itchycoo Park. 
Even if it isn’t specifically “spelled out”, many of these high performing companies effectively create environments where if you take time off, you are perceived as performing below your peers who work weekends.
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve advanced in my career is that the higher up you go, the less “work” you do. Sure I have all sorts of meetings, presentations, and sales calls and whatnot. But day to day, if I don’t show up, the business doesn’t just grind to a halt. At least not in the same way a restaurant does if the chef or the hostess or really any restaurant employee doesn’t show up.
Although I suppose the flip side of that is that on occasion where I do have a critical presentation or meeting, or need to respond to an important email, it’s not unreasonable for me to do so while I’m on vacation. Particularly if it’s the difference between a project being delayed a week until I get back.
Yeah, crazy hours are definitely for juniors. To be fair, show me a manager who spends significant amounts of time doing front line tasks with sorry deadlines and I’ll show you a manager who needs to learn how to argue for a bigger staffing budget.*
I once worked in a place where, if you left before 8, the boss would ask if you saw this as a job or a career. Joking! But not. People didn’t call in sick much there either. Until they took a month off for stress and then didn’t come back.
Turned out I saw it as a job, and a shit one too.
*Yes, I learned this the hard way.
In my first digital mapping job we got 3 sick days a year. And it was highly frowned on to take one.
This was a 24/7 shop. So hot seating at work stations. Sharing those spaces like that meant that every one was sick pretty much all the time.
Not in America!
This is not government mandated, but recently my employer, which also grants 3 days for bereavement for immediate family, recently changed to allow an additional 2 for out-of-state deaths of family. Probably due to the reality that it’s not that unusual to have to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles for a relative’s funeral these days with people spread out across a continent.
When my nephew died, though, he wasn’t considered close enough for a 3 day bereavement leave, only 1 day. And it was an out-of-state funeral. So I drove out and attended the funeral. Crashed at the house of an old friend who lived nearby. Set the alarm for 5 am the next day, woke up, called work, explained I was 250 miles away and there was no way I could make it in to work at the scheduled 7 am so I was Officially Calling Off, then rolled over and went back to sleep for a few more hours before driving back home.
My manager more or less knew I was going to do that, due to the logistics of it all. My attendance record still took a hit and still no pay for that day (until covid we never had paid sick time at my current employer, and it still applies only to covid). On the other hand, my attendance was otherwise perfect. Indeed, the first five years I worked there if I took off the usual question was “who died?”, in all seriousness, because that was the only reason I was taking off work.
When my dad died I called up the manager on duty and explained that my dad had died a few hours ago and I just couldn’t do the happy-chirpy retail thing. That manager was known as a stickler for the rules, but didn’t have a problem with that. I did not take my bereavement time that day, though, and I made sure that she understood that - I saved it for my father’s memorial, which was several weeks later when everyone could get together. Taking bereavement leave immediately was not actually ideal, as I would then have to reserve vacation time and burn that for the memorial. Again, not quite kosher but my management allowed it given that that was a 500 mile trip each way. So that day my dad died it was very much a “mental health day”, but a parent’s death is hardly something that happens often.
The rule book on leave for the company had probably been written in the mid-20th Century for a much more localized company. I’m glad they have since revised it, with more recognition for the need for travel in connection with bereavement for some of us.
Couldn’t you have used annual leave? I’ve often used annual leave to attend funerals for people who didn’t come under ‘compassionate leave’. Of course, my AL is quite generous.
Same here.
I’ve been teleworking full time (or nearly so) for about 8 years. The last time I had unplanned, last minute sick time off was 4 years ago, when I brought home a dose of what was most likely norovirus (judging by how quickly the rest of the household caught it), and by the time I was able to be more than 10 feet away from a bathroom, it was mid-afternoon.
I’ve occasionally taken a somewhat unplanned hour or two, of course.
One of the perks of many white-collar jobs is that there’s a certain amount of flexibility built in. You need a bit of extra time for a doctor’s appointment, you can simply tweak your schedule a bit, work a little later, or whatever. And a last-minute “:::cough::: too sick to work :::cough:::” day is generally less disruptive. It’d be interesting to see if people in that situation use more, less, or about the same in sick days as someone with a more rigid schedule - e,g, teachers, bus drivers, hospital staff - the sort of jobs where calling in sick really impacts the workplace by mandating a replacement on short notice.
Another failing in the USA - no nationally mandated maternity leave. Paid or unpaid. Which I think makes it the only wealthy Western country to have none. Here in CA the state mandates 12 weeks unpaid leave for new parents and 16 weeks unpaid pregnancy disability leave, also unpaid. And there are the usual suite of exemptions (employers with less than five people, workers with less than twelve months service, etc.).
Again as with vacation many employers offer paid maternity leave as a perk, but usually nowhere near twelve weeks.
I do not think I have “annual leave” in the sense you do.
Normally, I have to schedule a day off at least two weeks in advance. My nephew’s death was sudden. If I can’t plan at least that far ahead then my only choice is to “call off” for my scheduled shift. The company allows 1 day bereavement for a nephew. The trip would take me at least 2 days. Therefore, 1 bereavement day and 1 day calling off “without notice” (even if management knew I was going to call off).
By “schedule a day off” do you mean take a vacation day - or is it that you have no paid vacation days and if you want to be off on a particular day you have to request it far enough in advance for the schedule to be adjusted? Because it’s pretty common even for employers with limited paid time off and attendance policies and requirements for advance notice to still allow you to take a vacation day for a funeral or emergency , even while you are still subject to points or whatever because of an unscheduled absence.
Whether a vacation day or a regular unpaid day I require a minimum two week notice for scheduling.
No, I am not permitted to take one of my paid vacation days for either a funeral or an emergency.
The whole US non-system for employees is barbaric, it looks from this distance. Are these decisions made by computer or human beings? Because while we have guidance on how much advance notice we’re supposed to give for annual leave (vacation), as a manager I do have discretion to allow for last minute employee needs. Life happens!
It can look pretty barbaric up close, too. Don’t get me started on our so-called “healthcare system” which is pretty jacked up, too.
If a person calls in at least two hours before the start of a shift the manager can authorize a minimum number of points for not showing up as opposed to the maximum. That’s the extent of what they can do. If your attendance is otherwise perfect you could do this four times in a short time period before it starts to adversely affect you at work. You’d have to do this 12 times in a three month period before you’re in serious danger of being fired, but in an otherwise good employee they’d probably get HR involved to work out some sort of formal leave arrangement before things got that far.
The points eventually drop off your record.
I’ve worked other places where I could take a paid personal/vacation day at short notice. I’m just currently working in an industry where the long-standing “tradition” is a lot different, whether it should be or not.
There is no system. It’s mostly each employer making rules.
My current employer has a reasonably good system, except for there not being much paid time off for newer employees. (I’ve been here 20 years and have ample PTO.) Of course, even so, your boss can be a dick. When my father died, my boss told me not to worry about it, and i took time off until i decided it would be better for my mental health to return to work. That happened to be close to the “standard” amount of time granted for a parental death, but I had a good boss and he used his discretion to grant me whatever time i needed, without even telling me the standard. But i know a guy who needed to travel and asked his boss for slightly more than the standard and was told “no, any more time than x will be an unplanned absence”.
Note than an “unplanned absence” is just sick leave, and not actually a big deal. But no one calls it that, and he was basically communicating “taking that much time is bad”. He could have said, “the standard is x, but if you need more we’ll just treat it as sick time” and it would have counted exactly the same without his having communicated that he thought his employee was doing something wrong. And he could also have approved a couple extra days of bereavement leave.