You load 24 tons, and what do you get… 
I was getting to know a woman at work. We’d gone on a few dates. She quit and got a new job because she thought that it would be better for our relationship if we didn’t work together. Thing is, we didn’t work together. Our jobs had nothing to do with each other. That was the first clue that she was nuts. When I dumped her she complained that she left a great job for me. Didn’t ask you to. Didn’t know you were going to until you’d already done it.
A desire to work in a coal mine?
There have been cases where hospital workers quit their jobs or were fired over refusal to get flu shots. One Midwest health care system lost 50 workers that way.
At one hospital where I worked, a histology tech was a flu vaccine refuser. He was offered the option of wearing a surgical mask all day, which he accepted. I remember thinking he was nuts to accept the nuisance and discomfort of constant masking (which seems comical now in light of Covid-19).
Speaking of Covid-19, remember when masking was discouraged, even for health care workers? Early on in the pandemic, hospitals worried that masks would “panic” patients and staff, and reprimanded or even fired docs for wearing masks during routine patient visits or walking around the hospital.
I get that the woman was math challenged and did not know that 1.5 times 8 = 12, but I am curious:
In my location, there are labor laws that say work on a Statutory holiday like Christmas MUST be paid time and a half. There is no need for an employee to request this.
Is it that different in other places? Are there no laws specifying overtime rates?
Ohio has no such law.
I think everywhere in the U.S. has laws mandating overtime pay for actual overtime work. But not everywhere has “statutory holidays” that require private companies to pay overtime rates for working ordinary hours on specific days. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of this. It’s common practice for companies to have their own designated holidays and pay overtime for work on those days, and certainly just about any unionized workplace will have such rules, but honestly it’s news to me that it’s a statutory requirement anywhere.
British Columbia employment standards act: (and probably every province in Canada, although I have not looked it up)
Basic Rules:
Employees receive statutory holiday pay if they:
- Have been employed for 30 calendar days
and
- Have worked or earned wages (like paid vacation days or another statutory holiday) on 15 of the 30 days before a statutory holiday
In Britain, there is requirement for a certain amount of annual paid leave any employer MUST get in a year:
Statutory annual leave entitlement
Most workers who work a 5-day week must receive at least 28 days’ paid annual leave a year. This is the equivalent of 5.6 weeks of holiday.
I think in the developed world, the United States is probably an outlier when it comes to labor laws concerning this.
Only as a canary.
It’s not immediately clear from the information you gave, but it appears that in BC, other than some exempt categories, if you work on a “statutory holiday”, you actually get double time and a half. You get an average day’s wage regardless of whether you work, and if you actually work that day, you also get time-and-a-half for actual hours worked.
Looking at the UK government’s website on employee pay and leave policies,, it looks like workers in the UK actually aren’t legally guaranteed overtime pay (they still have to be paid for hours worked, but employers don’t have to pay a premium for overtime). And while an employee must get at least 28 days paid leave a year, there doesn’t appear to be any requirement that any specific days be given off. In fact,
Bank or public holidays do not have to be given as paid leave.
An employer can choose to include bank holidays as part of a worker’s statutory annual leave.
It appears that in BC, Ann_Hedonia’s co-worker would be statutorily entitled to double-time-and-a-half for working Christmas Day. In the UK, though, it appears their co-worker wouldn’t be statutorily entitled to any extra pay. They could request Christmas Day as paid leave, and I Am Not A UK Labor Lawyer, it sure looks like as long as their employer gave them 28 totals days paid leave in the year, they could require the employee to work Christmas Day with no extra compensation.
So, in the UK a front line manager might well have told the employee the exact same thing - the manager can’t change the rate of pay, but would pay them for twelve hours for eight hours of actual work.
The U.S. may well be an outlier in overall paid leave laws, but Canada might be the outlier in terms of legally requiring specific days to be designated as paid holidays.
Yes, you’re correct in that some countries don’t specify time and a half for statutory holidays. What they do instead is specify a certain amount of paid holiday time per year that employers must grant. I gather the US is one of the VERY few countries that does not do this (in fact I could only find 6 others, one of which (Tonga) is changing this).
Of course, many US employers do grant paid leave of some sort. But apparently around 33% of Americans don’t have any paid leave whatsoever. Pretty dismal when you think of it.
In Indiana, you must be paid for certain days, that you will probably not work, because the business will be closed. When I worked for school districts that were closed for two weeks for winter break, I got paid for two days-- Christmas and New Year’s. I could take vacation time in order to get a full paycheck, but I didn’t choose to.
When I worked for agencies that provided care to disabled people, we had some people we needed to staff on holidays, because they didn’t live with family or householders, and couldn’t be left alone. Everyone who worked full-time got paid for holidays anyway, so if they worked Christmas or New Year’s, they would get paid for the work as well-- double-time, in other words, and we also usually got authorized to pay time-and-a-half for Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Eve, but people for whom it was true overtime got double-time for that as well.
Before I worked for one agency in a supervisory role, I worked just about 8 hours a week while I worked for a school system as an interpreter/resource aide, where full time was 32 hours a week. Then, over the summer, and over breaks, I’d pick up lots of extra shifts.
Since I’m Jewish, I LOVED working Christmas. Since I was working full-time the weeks of winter break, I got double time for Christmas and worked like 70 hours, truth be told, and got double-time Christmas Eve, as well as time-and-a-half other shifts. Some was overnight sleep time, which paid only $5.25, but it was $7.88, for sleeping-- and if I had to be awake, it reverted to daytime rates, in four-hour blocks-- in other words, I got the sleep-rate, only if I got four solid hours uninterrupted.
Plus, I was getting some money from the school system.
One thing to keep in mind in cross-country comparisons like this is that in most countries, most workers are in the “informal” economy, and aren’t actually protected by such regulations. Among OECD countries, though, the U.S. is definitely an outlier in terms of statutory mandates for paid time off, in a lot of other ways, as well. (But, again, as far as having statutorily set extra pay for working on specific holidays, I’m not so sure the U.S. is actually an outlier).
Is that 33% of employees or 33% of workers? Self-employed workers, small business owners, independent contractors, and gig workers don’t even have an employer to give them paid leave. I’d actually be surprised if the percentage of the overall U.S. workforce without paid leave is that low.
Although, in the U.S., for some niche categories, unemployment compensation is a sort of government-provided paid leave. I have a friend in the film industry. He’s classified as an independent contractor, and while he usually gets some time off during a given project, between projects he has no income - there’s no employer to give him paid leave. But, he is eligible for unemployment compensation (albeit at a drastically lower rate than his normal pay when he’s working).
No, you are thinking of the Steam Rockets
Piker! 
According to this cite, it was “wage and salary workers”:
According to a recently released study from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 33 % of wage and salary workers in the US did not have access to any paid leave from 2017 to 2018. This is actually an improvement from 2011, when 38% of workers said they didn’t get paid leave .
We hired an administrative assistant who drove a classic Ford Mustang (probably a 68 or 69. Her first day on the job she was going out to lunch, and discovered the parking garage attendants surrounding her car with the hood up. She blistered them with obscenities, roared off in the car and didn’t come back.
She didn’t come back the next day, nor did she respond to phone calls. After a week of this, the boss sent her a certified letter telling her that we were holding her final paycheck (for four hours work) and that she needed to notify us whether she intended to return to work and continue employment, or we should consider her having resigned and mail her the check. She returned a one-line note saying she resigned.
Maybe having a bunch of parking garage attendants drooling over your classic car is suboptimal, but the boss felt her complaint should be against the garage, not us.
As the owner of a classic mustang (1965 fastback), I am of the opinion that this was a perfectly reasonable reason to quit your job, and possibly even move out of that particular city.
Minimum wage, probably.
You’re JEWISH?
(The above is an attempt at humor. If it fails to land, I offer my sincere and humble apologies.)