So, you normally get Christmas Eve off paid, but this year, since it’s on a Saturday, forget it? Yeah, I’d be a bit pissed off about that.
I work in manufacturing, too, and we are expected to use two vacation days (or go unpaid) between Christmas and New Year’s because the plant will be closed (the other days are covered by moving Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Year’s Day around). This is only the second year they have done this, and nobody I know thinks it’s unfair. It sure beats having to keep the plant open and get by with a skeleton crew. We have plenty of notice and we accrue leave throughout the year, so it’s not too hard to have two days to use. Last year, they wanted us to work Christmas Eve so they could do this (and not allow vacation time use that day, since it was year-end). There was a bit of pushback to this idea, so we ended up doing 4 10-hour days that week instead. It is nice to have a company that is willing to work with employees like that.
I was told by HR once (rather rudely…I didn’t think it was an unreasonable question) that my company would never close for weather (the owner lives nearby, so I suppose he could snowshoe over and unlock the doors if he had to), so if you can’t make it in, you have to use leave just as if you had called in sick, etc. We’ve gone home early for power outages, and you can either use leave or possibly stay later another day in the week and make up the time. I wouldn’t expect to be paid extra for going home!
I had that happen at a job once, and it was a nice bonus, since I wasn’t aware that it was coming. They had a grace period, so I had to use it before April 1.
First, an employee should view a Christmas bonus as just that: a bonus. Don’t budget with that in mind because as you said, it might be less than you expected or not happen at all.
Second, what problem would handing them out at the beginning of December solve? You say you don’t want to go into debt buying presents, but couldn’t you put them on a credit card and pay it off with the bonus? Doesn’t your card allow you a grace period and charge no interest on purchases paid off in the first month?
Third, you would rather have say a $100 Target gift card where you can only purchase $100 worth of goods from Target instead of a $100 bill where you can purchase goods from anywhere in the world, including Target?
For God’s sake, I’m a bartender and on holidays I work a fourteen hour day Thanksgiving and Christmas with no such thing as holiday pay and I am used to it. Do I get miffed when people bitch about their drinks when I am working OT on a holiday so that they can get drunk with THEIR families and THEIR friends? Of course. I get paid four bucks an hour plus tips. Do I file it under “this is the job description and I should get over myself?” Yep. I don’t even get breaks. My boss is annoyed when I eat on duty. Even if that means over half my day without food or more than a two second potty break.
You figure out what you are getting - salary, benefits, friends at work, stress level. All of it.
You compare it to what you are giving - time, effort, physical strain on your body, anxiety, working holidays.
If you think the end result is “unfair” - go see if you can find a situation that is more “fair.”
Back in the 90s I was a manager at a tech consulting firm. My employees were quick to tell me how everyone else was getting huge salaries other places. Our employer couldn’t afford huge salaries to someone who only spent 60-70% of their time billable at less than $100 an hour - and I tried to explain that. But apparently, the company was an endless source of money; showing them that their requested salary was unsupportable never sunk in. I stopped doing it. I started to say “I’d be sorry to see you go, but I think you should look for somewhere that can pay you what you are worth, because I can’t.” In three years of doing that job, none of those guys ever quit for a higher salary.
If the grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence - go vault the fence (I just did). There are plenty of people around right now who will tell you that a steady paycheck looks like a good deal - even if you don’t get very many holidays and don’t get bereavement leave.
If enough people do vault the fence because of employee treatment, either management/owners will catch the clue bus, the company will go under, or the status quo will remain and it will turn out that the owners actually have a pretty good idea of how valuable their employees are in the overall business. In some business models they really are critical - in other businesses you are an interchangeable cog, and don’t be too surprised when you are treated like an interchangeable cog.
It is illegal. But I have never worked at a tipped employee job that didn’t pull illegal shit; do you want the job or not? Is the mentality. And whoever works Thanksgiving and Christmas ends up making about $500 bucks. So does it still suck? Yes. Do I make more than somebody who gets legal breaks and paid holidays off? Yes. Working for somebody else is always a deal with the devil. Pick the one you hate the least.
I got my hours cut from full time to 20 hours a week. I take public transportation, but she needs me there 4 hours each day…half an hour I work each day pays for my transportation.
She comes in to collect the cash that our patients pay as copays, not reported to the irs. She had been paying her daughter’s bills through the office, but she has defaulted on her credit cards. Office did pay for her daughter’s boob job, though.
No pay for holidays either. Her son comes in once a month to clean the offices (we have 3 locations) and gets paid $200. He does such a wonderful job (insert sarcasm here). Left a small piece of tp next to the commode one day when he was coming in that night to clean…tp was there the next day. Any papers left on the desk, though? He scotch tapes them to the desk…
Okay, sure, it’s a bonus and you can’t count on it. But if I spent $50 per kid on presents because things were tight that year and we had to replace the furnace, and then got a $750 bonus ON CHRISTMAS EVE, which I did–then I could have sprung for somewhat better presents and got my kids what they wanted ON CHRISTMAS instead of the week after. You understand that sometimes things under the tree count; presents you can shake for a week or two count; things you can wonder about count; that’s part of Christmas. (Also one of my kids has a birthday less than a week before Christmas.)
The only reason I liked the gift cards better was that we got them much earlier in the month, otherwise I’d definitely prefer cash. But if I only get one, I’ll take gift card early in the month over cash on Christmas eve.
What the hell are you on? They didn’t “give” me two weeks on Jan 1. It was earned as I went along. They didn’t automatically say, “Okay, Jan 1, now you have two weeks to use any time.” You earned it as you went, so many increments of a day per month.
The only way for me to have two weeks of vacation to use in the summer was if I could carry it over from year to year, and since I started in the summer, that was never, ever going to happen. And since you had to use it all up, every year, by 12/31, there was no way to ever get more than 6 days in the summer. Which would be enough if I only got 6 days, but since I theoretically got more, I do resent being told I have to use them in the horrible dismal winter. And I would have had to do it every year.
My best friend lives in California and they routinely make him work on Thanksgiving, Easter, you name it. He’s a senior manager and all, but this is apparently true of all positions in the company. It’s a very well known firm.
I asked what he got in return for that. He gets nothing. When I asked about holidays, he told me there aren’t any required holidays in the State of California. I didn’t believe it, and looked it up, and damn, he was right. There aren’t. If your employer in California wants you to work on Christmas, work you shall.
I expect if your employer wants you to work on Christmas in any state, they can require you to. And I expect that they are not required in most states to pay hourly workers for the day if the business closes , nor give those who work on Christmas another day off with pay. New York doesn’t require employees to be paid for any time not worked , and if both NY and California don’t have required holidays, I doubt if any other state does.
How would anyone get more than 6 days by summer? It wouldn’t matter when you were hired, since the clock starts over at the beginning of the year.
Accrual and “use it or lose it” do not work very well together. In fact, my company just realized this…they used to only let you carry two weeks, but now you can carry up to your yearly maximum (depends on length of service), because they realized that there would not be enough people left to actually do the work in December otherwise. Was your office a ghost town at the end of the year?
The Big Boss started noticing that the office was looking like a ghost town in December, as everyone tried to use up their vacation by 12/31. So then he started restricting vacations WITH NO WARNING: "Oh, you have a week of vacation left? Sorry, I just decided you can’t take it in December, and you’ll lose those days at the end of the month."
Luckily, there was a loophole: if you got your vacation approved by Smaller Boss (and since Bigger Boss never actually talked to Smaller Boss) … then your vacation request slipped under the radar. TWICE I was safely in Seattle before The CEO noticed that I wasn’t at my desk, it was mid-December, and I wouldn’t be back until after Xmas.
Knowing he was fuming made the trip just that much sweeter.
The only way to get more than 6 days by summer was to start after Oct. 31, then you would start accruing on Jan 1.*
This was a publisher, so I think that it was pretty much a ghost town at the end of the year. I took my four days plus xmas and new year’s eve so I wasn’t there the first year, and by that time in the second year I was gone.
*ETA: Wait, that wouldn’t work, would it? You’d only accrue 6 mos by summer no matter what! But there were people who took off two weeks in the summer. Probably people who’d worked there 20 years.
I used to work in HR so I know all about how vacation time is accrued. A company either implements an ACCRUAL system OR they give you x number of weeks per year, which you either use or forfeit. There is no way they can implement BOTH, unless they employ a bunch of simpletons who’d never realize why those two systems were incompatible.
