The problem comes in when they refuse to approve vacation.
I’m not going to say that no place does that - my point was that a policy of “every employee must take X consecutive days each year” isn’t needed to limit the employer’s liability for accrued vacation.
Yes, but that’s your problem, not the company’s problem.
And then they wonder why there is so much malicious compliance and people “don’t want to work anymore”
Whenever I hear the phrase “people don’t want to work anymore” coming from a business owner, I automatically translate it to: “People don’t want to be treated like shit for poor wages anymore.”
That’s what I think too.
Buildings with older ionization-type smoke detectors often have this type of rule. They can be quite sensitive to burning popcorn. Dumping an entire building for 20 minutes because someone set the microwave for 30 seconds too long is a bad thing.
I managed a 24-hour emergency dispatch center once that was evacuated because someone put a personal pizza in the microwave and set it for 20 minutes, as opposed to the recommended 2 minutes.
I’m sure that’s true - but at the places I worked where microwaving popcorn wasn’t allowed, it had to do with the smell of burnt popcorn as it didn’t set the alarms off.
At my place, a public university, if too much vacation time gets swept or you don’t take more than a certain number of vacation hours per year, your boss gets called in for a talking to. They want to make sure that your boss isn’t refusing vacation requests. If your boss is refusing all of your vacation requests, then supposedly they’re told to fix their shit.
Here is one that fortunately doesn’t directly affect me up in my ivory tower. BNSF railroad workers are given time off based on a new point system called Hi-Viz. They loose points for missing work for any reason, including being sick, and scheduled days off. The only way to regain points is to be on call for 14 days straight without missing any days or calls.
The unions don’t like it, but they are legally not allowed to strike, so the railroad company has no real incentive to negotiate.
Current rules are that freight trains need two personnel to operate them. Some think that the harsh leave policy is an attempt to drive away employees (which it is doing), so that the railroads won’t have enough employees to run trains. Then they can go begging to regulators for a rules change to only require one person to operate a freight train.
Sounds like the worst possible interpretation of “per diem”. There’s no point in calling it that, if you still have to account for crap. If you need to do receipts etc, then it’s not unreasonable to have an overall limit - e.g. can’t eat at a $$$$ restaurant on the company dime - but that’s not a true per diem. And as you describe it, it’s a huge pain in the neck.
My company actually does issue me a company credit card. If I buy lunch with it while on travel, then basically I have to pay for that lunch out of my pocket (out of the per diem lump sum, anyway). Our expense system ties directly to Amex, so all transactions get synchronized.
So the hotel costs get synced, and I report / expense those on one line of the report. Ditto transportation costs.
The miscellany: I basically say “I travelled 7 days. Per diem is 50. You owe me 350” But then I link the lunch to that, and they pay Amex the 10 bucks (or whatever) and give me 340.
As a rule, I won’t put that kind of expense on the Amex because a) I don’t need them to see every nickel and dime I spend, and b) if I put it on my personal card, I get whatever rewards that card gives. But if cash is tight for me, I have the option to put it all on the company card, and net it out of my per diem as noted above. That beer at the end of the day would show up as a purchase at the restaurant, and unless it was Hooters or Get-Drunk-As-A-Skunk Cafe, would be unlikely to cause comment, as long as it got paid (either directly by me, or by netting it out of my per diem).
We used to have Diner’s Club, which was a real pain. Not all places take Amex. Even FEWER places take Diner’s Club.
We never got a check in advance - though 25+ years ago, we could go to the travel department and get an actual cash advance - as in, folding green pieces of paper.
We’re NOT supposed to use our Amex for personal expenses when not travelling on business, for obvious reasons (the company guarantees the payment, and if we don’t pay, People Get Spoken To). In practice, the occasional personal expense won’t cause much comment, as long as the bill gets paid. We’ve accidentally used my husband’s card several times - once when Amazon billed the wrong card, and 2 or 3 times when renting a car from Fudge-it… rentals in MY name have HIS frequent-renter number tied to them, and THAT has his corporate card, and even when I present my card when renting, somehow they insist on billing his card. If I don’t catch that, we have to hurry up and pay it off! (happened just 2 weeks ago with a rental on vacation, grrrr).
Mama_Zappa - I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore. I’ve pretty much stopped traveling. I do have a company CC for needed software purchases and such.
When COVID struck, and I was pretty sure that I would be working at home, I put $3000 on my own dime to do so, and upgrade my elderly systems at home. It needed it anyway. I would only expect to.
TPTB want me to get a thin client at home, that they will give me, but I have no need for it. I understand though. I have stood my ground that I am keeping my 43" monitor.
I’m going to give my department of 16 people a big kudos. When COVID struck, the 16 of us got 300 people connected to work from home. Did it in 72 hours. Some peoples office desks where ping pong tables at the time. But it worked.
Pointless: I work for a major research university. All employees were mandated to take anti-bullying and harassment training, which isn’t a terrible idea. The training, however…
We were required to watch a six-minute video and take a quiz. As life is short, I skipped the video. The quiz was four multiple-choice questions. Three I got right based on common sense; the other asked the year in which the university instituted its policy, which doesn’t seem all that central. But since each question had only four options, and you could literally take the quiz until you got 100%, I easily got my certification, having learned exactly nothing.
We’ve had similar “trainings”; pretty common in the corporate world, I understand, but rather embarrassing for an institution whose main remit is education.
Good rule. Some workplaces also ask “No Fish” in the microwave.
Well, not always but often enough it is certainly a Red Flag.
I’ve probably told this story in the Workplace Rants thread. My former Horrible Coworker burnt fish in the microwave. The stench was so thick you could cut it with a knife. 
I always thought the point of those wasn’t for you to learn anything: that it’s not actually meant to serve as ‘education’ or ‘training’ or whatever, but just to give the suits something to point at in the context of legal proceedings. ‘Hey, we fulfilled our obligations not by merely putting our written policy in front of him, but by then quizzing him on it — and, sure enough, he got a 100% score. No, I can literally show you the date and time when he actively clicked the correct answer; according to our lawyers, that’s technically enough to suffice. So don’t say we didn’t tell him about this; we can pinpoint the exact moment when he pushed the They-Told-Me-About-This button.’
Re: Vacation Issues
I used to work for a manufacturing plant . Policy was no vacation carryover (use it or lose it). Traditionally, the plant would be closed the week between Christmas and New Years. Hourly employees were encouraged to hold a week of vacation so they could still get paid for that week. Now, each department would tell their employees that, if production demands required it, they may be required to work. Traditionally, when this occurred, the affected employees would get paid standard time for their vacation time and all hours worked would get paid as overtime at 1.5 times their hourly wage (assuming they had 40 Hours of vacation time). This was enough incentive to keep the workers from complain about not being allowed to take their vacation.
That all worked better than I thought it would, until the company hired a new Comptroller. He came up with this great idea to “pay in lieu of vacation” instead of letting the vacation time count towards the weekly overtime. The first time they did this, the employees were PISSED OFF! They complained and bitched and were told, “Hey, it’s perfectly legal.” The next year, in November, the foremen informed management that most of their employees had announced they were going to be out-of-town that week so they probably wouldn’t be able to staff their departments that week. Around Thanksgiving, management said, “OK, we’ll just schedule things so you won’t need them.” During the week after Thanksgiving, management realized that they couldn’t schedule a sunrise and were going to be in trouble. Missed deliveries, which upsets customers, which upset Sales, but most of all, missed production targets, which affects their bonuses. They not only reversed their “pay in lieu of vacation” policy, but also offered an extra week of vacation for the next year for all employees needed to work that week. After that, they went back to their old policy.
We’d planned to visit my wife’s family the week before Christmas. I got told that they’d never approve me taking off during December, which also meant I’d lose the vacation time.
BUT, here’s where things (and I) got tricky. Two different people (the two VPs) have to approve vacation: my immediate boss and the scheduler, who was also the head of accounting.
So I went and talked to accounting about something trivial, then as I passed my boss’s office said “Oh, I was just in the accounting office, and I’m planning to take Dec.18th to 26th off.”
Boss assumed the other VP approved my vacation (and would not want to anger him by even asking about it), so he said “Oh, okay.” Which meant I could stick my head into accounting and say “By the way, my boss said it’s okay for me to take Dec.18th to 26th off.” “Okay, I’ll put that on the schedule.”
A couple people asked me how I ever got vacation near the end of the year, and I was bursting to tell them I’d been devious.
It hasn’t been discussed since my university moved to Kronos a year and a half ago, but prior to that we’d get several reminders a year that you must take at least 45% of your vacation time by June 30th each year. There was a rumor that if you got to the second week of June with insufficient past time off on the books, not only was your supervisor talked to, you were forced to take off the end of June.
I’ve had two separate sets of training like that for high school, run by two entirely different organizations. And yeah, like @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper says, it’s not about training; it’s about being able to SAY that you’re training.
[quote=“Euphonious_Polemic, post:324, topic:962273, full:true”]
I can’t find it online, but there was a widely-quoted homily (which apparently was posted in workplaces) about how if you worked for an employer, you should really work for them, being loyal and not griping about stuff. It was a classic.
Even better, employees should recognize that the Bible tells them to be subservient and STFU.
"Apostle Paul gives clear instructions on how a servant should relate to their master. They must be faithful, trustworthy and loyal. The same applies to us today in our dealings with employers:
9 Urge bondslaves to be subject to their own masters in everything, to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, 10 not pilfering, but showing all good faith so that they will adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in every respect.
Titus 2:9-10 (NASB)
Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for any honest work,
Titus 3:1 (RSV)
5 Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; 6 not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, 7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men, 8 knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free."
“Consider the lilies of the field…”
