They are family owned by devout Christians; they put bible verses on all their cups and bags.
[QUOTE=A Yorkshireman]
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
[/quote]
Kidding…I feel for people with sucky employers.
So that would explain shutting down on Thanksgiving? That they’re Christians?
Yes. Givings thanks to God and all that.
I currently have 37 hours of vacation. Almost a week! Hooray!
I have to “pay” for the 8 hours I was required to take on Thanksgiving, which comes out of my pay cycle tomorrow. I also will be dinged for 8 hours for Monday, Dec. 26, my mandatory day off for the Christmas holiday, and 8 more for Jan. 2, for New Year’s. So that’s 24 hours out of my 37, leaving 13.
I haven’t had a day off that I actually scheduled myself since August.
Holy crap Sigmagirl that sucks. How is that legal?
Why would it not be legal? Private employers are not required to give any paid vacations or holidays.
And the United States is the only country in the industrialized world that does not require employers to do so.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
Wow. I think I would lose my mind! That’s awesome, by the way - not sure how it would work in a law firm, but the ONLY way I would ever see myself getting two weeks off without even a log-in would be under threat of force (or coma).
But I would be jonesing to check email at least after about 6 hours.
Luckily, Europe is doing fantastic right now so they can thumb their nose up at us.
**Sigmagirl **might work for a company that has a PTO (Paid Time Off) bank. Instead of differentiating between sick, vacation, and holidays, they lump everything together in a “PTO” bank. Doesn’t matter if you use it to go to the doctor, a ballgame, or Christmas. PTO is PTO. Of course, PTO is accrued at a much higher rate because everything is lumped in together. Holidays can be tricky because the impetus falls on the employee to keep enough hours banked so that they’ll get paid following holidays.
Depending on how many hours they give to employees each year for “sick” time, most healthy employees come out ahead with a PTO system. I know I would because I rarely take a day off sick. So if they “gave” me 5 days per year, most years I’d end up with at least an extra 4 vacation days thrown into my bank.
That is so far out of my frame of reference that I had no idea.
Well, Europe may not be doing that well, but Canada is doing all right even though we give employees paid holidays.
Really, the entire US mentality around this makes my brain hurt. I’m just going to go sit in the corner and drink egg nog and contemplate my navel.
Ditto. I’m outside Washington DC, where there are a dozen or three federal employees running around somewhere, and the day after Thanksgiving is indeed NOT a holiday. Many - but by no means all - private employers do give that as a day off, ditto schools, but there are any number of professional employers that do not. Financial firms might be open as well (banks certainly are).
Note that I’m excluding retail and other places that are open to sell you stuff that day; the company I subcontract to does not have it as a holiday and we’re IT professionals.
The Monday after Christmas: I don’t feel the hate there either. Most places only get one day off for that holiday.
Now, places that ARE open the day after Thanksgiving do tend to be sparsely populated, as anyone who can take the day as vacation usually will do so, but if they need a minimum number of people there for coverage, your request might be denied. Similarly for time off between Christmas and New Year.
Of course, your employer might well suck donkey balls in other ways, but grumbling about those holidays won’t raise my ire.
I’m not saying Black Friday is a total government shut down day, but certainly some MAJOR branches give it as a holiday. The Federal Court system is shut on it, for instance. The commute into DC that is one of the easiest of any non-federal holiday of the year.
Let’s be honest: Europe’s problems have little to do with the fact that they treat their workers with some degree of dignity and respect. Germany is doing pretty well, and they have much better labor laws than the US. Our labor laws are pretty damn draconian if you ask me - noone is legally entitled to time off (aside from situations covered under FMLA), noone is entitled to helthcare, or any other benefits.
Case in point - my wife’s stepmother works for a national arts-crafts retail chain (rhymes with “Schmichael’s”), and they play games with her hours, keeping her just under the “full-time” threshold to prevent having to give her benefits and paid time off, under their corporate policy (edit)of granting benefits to workers with a certain number of hours per year(/edit). And worse, they’ll assign her double-shifts on holidays, but because they pay federal holidays at time + 1/2, they then won’t work her for a week or more to balance out the payroll. Which means that she often actually gets paid less for the holiday period than for a normal period. Some Christmas bonus, huh?
This is a woman who had left the workforce to raise two kids, and was then left by her husband of 25 years, at the age of 55 - this is literally the only job she could get. She has no healthcare, gets no paid time off, and earns about $900 a month. I think it’s a disgrace that she isn’t entitled to paid time off, but what’s even worse is that, under federal law, she isn’t entitled to any time off, paid or unpaid, aside from medical and family emergencies. If she wants to take 2 weeks of her own time off, unpaid, her employer is entirely in their rights to tell her to stuff it, even if she gives advance notice.
But hey, all in the service of the free market, right?
The reason Germany is in a position to bail out Europe lies in large part because they work longer and harder than their Greek brethren. The Greek economy simply cannot sustain itself with the increasing the burden of doling out very generous pensions to workers who retire in their 50s and live into their 70s or 80s. (FTR, Greek workers generally retire in their late 50s; Germans, on the other hand, retire in their late 60s.)
Status quo (being able to retire relatively young and enjoy the last few decades of our lives on our savings/pension) is no more for the great majority of us.
For a long time I worked for a place that gave PTO, which in theory covered everything–holidays, sick time, vacation.
The second year I worked there, my boss and I had a big project due and we worked on Memorial Day, which was supposed to be a holiday. We put it on our time cards so we wouldn’t get dinged for 8 hours out of our PTO when we had worked, and the HR person yelled at both of us saying we needed to get time and a half for that day…because it was a holiday…and we were supposed to clear it ahead of time, on account of the time and a half.
Now this was ridiculous. We were both on salary (although I could get overtime; my boss couldn’t, but then, she got paid a lot), but we both got PTO and accumulated it at the same rate and didn’t want to lose 8 hours of it. But we didn’t care about getting time and a half, either. So we ended up doing this complex mathematical thing where we said we’d worked 5.something hours, so it ended up at 8, and it was just weird. The thing was that it was a hospital, so obviously there would be employees who were required to work on every holiday, so there were incentives.
I have no idea what the best way to do this is for employees. When I had my own business, I pretty much worked 90-100 hour weeks, and never got a day off, and almost missed my own kid’s 4th birthday party, so when I went back to work for somebody else I was like “Hey! Free days off! Yowza!”
Employers and employees do not play a zero sum game. It is not necessarily the case that what benefits one harms the other. This is where the left often errs. It is also not necessarily the case that what benefits one benefits the other. This is where the right often errs.
It is in the interest of your employer that you work as hard as possible while being paid as little as necessary. A high rate of unemployment benefits your employer by making it easy for him to replace you, and by making it difficult for you to get a better job.
This is one of the reasons Republican politicians pursue policies that will keep unemployment high. The other reason is that they know President Obama will be blamed for a high unemployment rate.
And the Spanish and Irish? Before the crisis, Ireland was held up as a European model for how to do business. Spain was running surpluses.
I guess you want to turn the European financial situation into some kind of moral failing on the part of the ‘lazier’ nations, but most of the nations currently in trouble (i.e. not Greece) had good budget situations before the meltdown.
That’s not a moral failure on the part of (most of) the troubled nations but a moral failure on the part of the folks in charge of the Euro zone’s fiscal and monetary policy.