What is the sick time policy? Are you expected not to get sick for the next 6 months? Can you go “in the hole” on PTO? Like, can you borrow time off from the future?
Basically, if I get sick, I don’t get paid. That’s another reason why I’m getting nervous about this whole thing because I tend to get sick a lot in the winter (I have a lot of sinus problems) and while I won’t be taking weeks off at a time, if I push myself too hard I wind up with bronchitis.
Knock on wood, Ive been good so far (with the exception of my sinus surgery at the end of Feb) but I don’t expect my body to cooperate for more than a year before getting the full amount of PTO. Especially with how tired I have become from the amount of work Ive been doing.
Our days are 5 days sick time, 5 days vacation/personal time, and 1 day for your birthday.
I work till almost 7 because by the time my boss gets to sit with us to go over the daily emails that we cannot answer ourselves, it is about 5:30. (Basically, our daily department meeting) So we are told other things to handle on top of what we bring into the meeting, and that extends my time here.
Ive been doing the same amount of work that I started out doing. I was a temp to perm position, so my workload and expected abilities have not changed.
I have absolutely no problem with traveling. But the areas of China that I will be sent to are more industrial. I will be visiting factories while there. So I wont be staying in the safest or cleanest cities.
I was hired by my boss- who is our companies Import Manager. I have no contract, just the handbook. I had to sign pages out of the handbook so I made sure I read it thoroughly. It has not been updated in a few years and it really does not cover a lot.
As far as the pro-rated days, my boss would have no clue how many days I should get and would direct me to speak with the person in accounting that I already spoke with.
For the holidays, from my experience being here last holiday season, the work load is very small. But again, that week without pay will suck. I will take your suggestion on trying to set aside money, but Im still playing catch-up with the fact that I took a pay cut to become a temp here as well as added a 180 a month transportation bill.
So why are you working late every day, then taking a day off to recover from exhaustion?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to work 9-6, and not need to take a day off every now and then to recover?
If you absolutely positively need that extra hour to get your work done, then how can you get your work done if you take off a whole day?
If you’ve been loaded with too much work, you can either suck it up and work harder (but it seems like you’ll crash if you do this), or slack off a bit and don’t get your work done (not so good), or talk to your lead and let them know the amount of work you’ve been assigned isn’t sustainable, or figure out how to do your assigned work faster (may or may not be possible, depending on the work).
I have not taken any days off. If I could leave at 6 every day, i would do so gladly. If I cannot sit with my boss until 5:30 PM though, that is not happening.
My boss is aware of the overload of work we have, which is why he just hired another girl. It helped a bit because at the moment we are slower than we were a month ago, but I wont know how efficient 3 of us as opposed to 2 of us will be once we get hit with a slew of orders again.
Humm - well it’s sort of sounding like this job isn’t turning out to be exactly what you expected. I think the ‘Temp to Perm’ thing is a bit of a misnomer - I think often times a company will say this to get a better quality employee than if it was promoted as strictly temp, but often times it doesn’t actually happen and the company makes up some song and dance about budget cuts or changes in projects or whatever.
Also, it does sound like since you became full time your boss has suggested adding travel to your portfolio, so it’s not true that your position hasn’t changed since the change in status.
So, I don’t know what to tell you. I think the temp to perm thing is a non starter - it’s a pretty standard way of doing things in many industries including the additional probation period. As far as the PTO - well, I suspect that as you’re on probation they’re holding you to the letter of the law - after that period it sounds like that will loosen up.
Really, I think you need to figure out what sorts of things you can live with - you say you’ve increased your travel bill and decreased your pay to take this position - I hope you’ve considered what advantages this position has to make that a good idea. Once you start balancing things out you’ll need to decide if the long hours and extra travel are worth the perks you get with this job, or if you’d be better looking for something else.
I will say at age 23 I assume you’re a fairly junior employee - generally as careers progress the amount of crap you need to put up with declines, so at least you have something to look forward too. 