I get Good Friday off. I believe that is standard.
I work Remembrance Day at regular pay. I believe that is standard.
Well hey, I just found this link:
It looks like Remembrance Day is standard where I am (AB) and optional where you are (ON). However, it also looks like there are a bunch of standard, non-optional holidays in ON, and apparently in California there are NONE?!?!? How the heck is that normal. The mind boggles.
Every big company I worked for has accrual with carryover.
My current company I accrue 120 hours per year earned over the course of the year (there less than five years), I can carry over 40 hours into the next year. So at the beginning of next year, I’ll start with something close to 40 hours so that if I want to vacation in March, I have a full week. But if I have 56 hours on the books, I’ll need to use 16 of them before the end of the year or they are gone.
My last company allowed you to carry 300+ hours from year to year. And most people who had been there for ten plus years had that much - you get paid it when you leave, so it was part of RIF insurance.
That’s very common. An accrual system without carryover makes little sense.
Mine gives a set amount based on tenure (e.g. 2 weeks per year that is given on January 1st) that you either use or lose, however you can carry over 2 weeks if you want but you have to use it by April 1st.
Well, they had a lot of long-term employees. Pretty much everybody else had worked there for years. So it’s possible they had one way to calculate it for the first year and another way one you got some seniority. I know people with 3+ years got more vacation, but I don’t know how it worked because once I realized I could never get all my vacation when I wanted to take a vacation–which was one year–I was out of there.
Interestingly, it states this on the prelude: “Federally regulated employees also get Easter Monday.”
Ahhh, no. Not this Federal Employee.
I don’t get Dalton’s Family Day in February either.
Ah, then you’re talking about an unpaid day off? None, unless they’re losing sales or something. I know very little about how retail works as far as giving people even unpaid days off. But I imagine that it would cost at least some if that sort of company was not doing what pays the bills for a whole day.
However, if you’re asking for an extra holiday day, then it’s quite expensive. My old company (which started with about 3 people a little over 10 years ago) is now up to approximately 50 people. The 11 federal holidays a year that are provided cost the company a quarter of a million dollars. That’s not easy for a small company. When we all started, we donated a LOT of “love time,” went naked on insurance, did what we could to help get the company on its feet.
50 employees is still a pretty mall business and 250k isn’t chump change, especially when they have to compete with the big dogs in the industry. A lot of people seem to think that because someone is the owner of a company that suddenly, magically there’s no end to their so-called money tree, and that they’re being “selfish” is they aren’t handing out bennies and freebies right and left.
My current company and the company I worked at right before I moved to Seattle have an interesting solution. We get fewer holidays than the normal 11 federal holidays. However, our company has made two of the holidays (in lieu of Veteran’s and some other “lesser” holiday I don’t recall right now), the day after Thanksgiving and the day before or after Xmas (depending on when it falls close to a weekend).
It’s a great way of doing it, we only have 9 holidays a year (my previous company had 10), but to have two extra ones around that time of year when folks really want to be with family and so on, it’s worth it. A good friend of mine, who happens to still work for my old company was just visiting me from Anchorage, and he is going to suggest that method to my old boss (that was 2, or maybe 3 companies ago :D). Perhaps some of the companies who don’t do the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas might be willing to do that. (shruggie smilie).
My supervisor comes in at 8ish (9:30 on thursdays) and leaves by 3 to to coach basketball. He takes hour long lunches. He does nothing when he’s there. We do all the admin work for him. This is in education. He left at 12 on the Weds before Thanksgiving just because he could, even though the rest of the f/t staff stayed til 3:30.
Does your boss do that, too?
My supervisor is breaking his own contract, but his boss is his friend so he doesn’t care. Still, sucks for morale.
You know how Japan likes everyone to think they’re these massively over-worked work-a-holics?
What they fail to mention: Japan has 11 three-day holidays - pretty much one a month! Plus, they have at least three periods of long holidays during the year for ‘Golden Week’ (last week of April or early May), ‘O-bon’ (mid-August), Silver Week (September - can be up to five days in a row if the days fall right) and New Years (Usually from the 28th-29th through the 4th or 5th.). Obviously not all companies get all of these off, but most do - don’t plan a trip to rural Japan in mid-August, because everything will be shut down. Up until a few years ago people would line up at the ATMs on the 27th of December because even the ATMs shut down for the New Years’ break.
The downside is: those ‘long periods’ are the only time people actually take vacation. So everywhere is crowded and expensive. Not nice at all.
I work in the UK. We have 4 or 5 ‘bank holiday’ three-day weekends, a couple of days for Easter, couple of days for Xmas, and that’s it. For…um, obvious reasons, Thanksgiving is not really that big here <g>.
Since I work for a Japanese bank, of course, that means that along with the actual ‘don’t come to work’ days, Japanese holidays can also be nice and slow for the rank-and-file. I’ve taken a common sense approach: My concern is that we have coverage for each function at all times; other than that, they’re free to come up with a schedule amongst themselves for who wants to come in. And if you’re not onsite, unless you’re taking an actual vacation day I expect you to be available and on call if needed. It works out very well - people take turns having a free day off, people that come in have a fairly easy day and in fact it’s a great opportunity to catch up on admin stuff and such.
Again, maybe I’m dumb, but Canvas, how does giving an 11 person office that doesn’t sell anything, buy anything, etc (we are in Real estate development) the day after Thanksgiving as a holiday cost anything. We aren’t losing sales, we aren’t buying anything. The only cost I can see is that by making Black Friday a holiday, is that you allow your employees to take a vacation day somewhere else during the year. Basically my question is, how do put a value on a vacation day? Particularly when my employer (for example) buys 2 properties per year.
Sure it does. I want my people taking their holidays. They should be enjoying time with their family.
For my team my default is I only allow five automatic carry-over days, and I start reminding people in like March to 'use 'em or lose ‘em’. Of course if anyone ever came to me and said they couldn’t use all of them for whatever reason, I’d never not approve carryover (company doesn’t buy back, btw), but so far it’s never been a problem. Seems no one has an issue with taking more vacation time in the summer <g>
Interestingly, we also have a ‘10 days off mandatory’ rule. You have to take at least one 10-business day stretch each calendar year where you don’t come in, don’t log on from home, etc. You need approval from the CEO to -not- take it (I couldn’t take it one year and got hate mail from HR for months about it, but it just wasn’t feasible that year).
I think what she’s saying is that it’s odd to not have accrued your final day of vacation until mid-December but be under threat of losing it if you don’t take it by December 31. What if your department suddenly gets busy and you just don’t have the opportunity to take it off? That’s not fair to the employee to lose an earned day off merely because there is only a two week window each year in which they can take it.
If you don’t officially accrue that day off until the end of the year, it’d be nice if the company allowed you to carry over a few of those days into the next year to ensure that you can take them comfortably. If you just receive a lump of days at the beginning of the year to take at your leisure, then yeah, use-it-or-lose-it works.
I worked for an employer once that expected me to work weekends and evenings. Not unusual. Except they also expected me to work regular hours Mon - Fri. This went on for months. No overtime - I kept track and they told me I’d get equivalent time off (the law calls for time and a half for hours above 40/week).
At the end of a year, I let them know that I was taking some time off that was owed me… 4 months of time off. They were shocked. I was not supposed to actually USE the accrued time off. They had to hire someone temporarily to cover for me. When this happened again the next year (another 4 months off), the penny dropped, and they actually hired more staff to cover weekends and evenings, like they should have done in the first place. Stupid employers.
I prefer to be able to carry over a couple of weeks at least. Having a cap makes sense (and really, all of the tenured employees tend to sit at the cap either way, and save what they can – so they will keep taking time off). I don’t want to go into the hole if I don’t have enough time to take for some emergency, and being able to have some flexibility. This is especially the case with PTO, rather than vacation vs. sick day, accounting methods. I like to have a cushion so I never need to worry that I can’t get time off when it’s really needed (excepting a business priority of some kind).
I enjoy time with my family when I can take it when I want to, rather than being forced to use it up at inopportune times. At least being able to carry over half of what you accrue per year is something I strongly prefer and look for when considering employers.
Well, I get comp time - I’m staying late tonight for some function and I get to take that time some other time. Not everybody gets that, though. I get paid just the same if there’s a closing snow storm, although our part-timers on wages are screwed.
An “accrual system” involves taking the amount of time that you are allowed to take in a year and dividing it up by the number of pay periods in that year. That amount is put into a bank. You can deduct from that bank only when you have accrued sufficient hours.
Let’s say you are entitled to 2 weeks of vacations per year. You get paid bi-weekly, which is roughly 26 pay periods per year.
2 weeks = 80 hours
80 vac hours divided by 26 pay periods = 3.08 vacation hours per pay period.
So every pay cycle (2 weeks), you accrue 3.08 hours of vacation. If you wish (and company policy allows it), you can take one vacation day (8 hours) after every 3 pay cycles. Or, you can keep the hours banked for 13 pay cycles so that you have enough banked to take a full week (13 pay cycles). The system works well no matter what time of the year you were hired. If you were hired on July 15, 2010, one year later, you’d have earned 80 hours of vacation.
As you can see, an accrual-based system ONLY works if you allow at least some hours to carry over into the next year. If you didn’t, and all employees were reset to zero on January 1st, then everyone in the company earning 2 weeks would have to wait until June 1st to take a week off in the summer. And they’d never be able to take 2 weeks off in a row. Worse, NOBODY would ever be able get to take their full allotment because the last 3.08+ hours wouldn’t be deposited until the last pay cycle of the year.
That is why an accrual system without carryover doesn’t fly, logically speaking.
If it’s an unpaid day off it wouldn’t. What I know about real estate development wouldn’t fill a thimble, so I’m not quite sure how the math would translate over to that industry. Since your company is only 11 employees and my former company is 50, it’s obviously going to be a lot less than 250k. "Scuse my horrible doing-numbers-in-my-head math, but I’m gonna say it would cost your employer about a fifth of that, which is what? $50,000? $60,000?
The point is, if they have to pay for people to do nothing and it’s a big yearly cost for a small company, it’s akin to one of US having to pay for some service that we’re not getting for a few days every other month or something (like doggone cable outtages maybe? we never got credited for those things, we still paid our monthly fees). If someone came along and said "hey, tell you what, you need to start paying 10% more on top of what you’re already paying but you’re not getting a THING for it. No, no it’s not the law, but you’re a real jerk if you don’t burden your own bottom line in order to make sure you’re being “nice”.
Maybe your boss is a true Scrooge and hates everyone and just wants to make everyone suffer, but if it’s a teeny company of only 11 employees, he’s probably just struggling to make his company stay afloat, just like everyone else, just a slightly larger scale. That 50/60k could mean the difference between keeping all of his employees, or having to cut back on hours or positions.
It’s very easy, when one is in an unpleasant situation to cast aspersions on the other guy and ascribe motives to him because of one’s own unhappiness. That said, I AGREE, it isn’t nice to not get as many holidays as some companies do and I totally sympathize. I’ve been there too.
While is does ‘cost’ the employer in that they are paying for people to not be there, I think the objection is that in some jobs, there is nothing to do on those days because the rest of the industry is off.
So, if I have an order desk job and there is no one else in my industry working, I won’t be taking orders because our customers would not be at their place of work to make them.
(Granted, I am in Canada and since many of our customers are in the US, I use US Thanksgiving to clean up old items and reorganize for next year even though there is no new stuff coming in.)
Even In N Out shuts down for Thanksgiving and Christmas days. Makes sense, since burger sales would most likely be very low on those days.
Working for a very large Japanese corporation (with a large sales & service component) in the US, we get thirteen holidays per year. Some years eleven holidays plus two floating; other years it is 10 and 3. For 2012 we get:
New Years
Presidents Day
Good Friday
Memorial Day
Independence Day
Labor Day
Thanksgiving
Black Friday
Christmas Eve
Christmas Day
New Year’s Eve
plus two floating.
This year we get Friday and Monday for Christmas, but nothing for New Year’s Eve (but we get an extra floating).
They did cut back from 10 to 6 days of sick/occasional days a couple of years ago.
We get X number of weeks vacation a year (no accrual) depending on how long we’ve been here; I’ve been here for quite a while so I get 4. Both vacation and sick time are technically use them or lose them, which I thought was very common in corporate America, but maybe not having read this thread. Managers are allowed some discretion in letting employees carry a small amount of vacation time, but I think anything more than carrying a week into the first month after time resets would be strongly frowned upon.
So there’s good and bad about my benefits, it seems. Lots of holidays, but no carrying days (and I never use all of them).