How many days off do you really have each year?

Unlimited Paid Time off and Other Lies Companies Tell You (that'd make for such a cool book title, no?)

“I don’t feel like you need an experience to radicalize you when you have to ask another adult permission to go on a vacation.” — Sophia Benoit 

This was a quote tweet (X?) to the question, “What experience in the workplace radicalized you?.” When I saw it earlier this morning, I merely chuckled. I felt grateful that I was self-employed, so I could take a holiday anytime. 

Then I spoke to my friend in the afternoon, and she told me her manager didn’t approve her leaves. We’re due to go on a trip in the next three months, and we need visas¹, which need her company’s NOC.

The funny thing is the company she works for offers unlimited PTO. 

In theory, she should be able to take as much time off as she needs as long as she completes her work and her leaves don’t disrupt business. But everyone knows that’s a copout condition. There will always be more work to do; that’s just the nature of business, and despite planning 3+ months ahead, she (or anyone else, for that matter) can’t predict if it’ll disrupt business three months later. 

Can you actually take as many days off as you want?

According to research, people with UPTO take fewer days (13) off than those with a specific number of paid days off (15). Oh, and most UPTO folks spend their paid time off working more often than not. 

My friend already told me she’ll be carrying her laptop and work phone along, so she’s available for anything her colleagues might need. Which, while sweet, is also terrible — what kind of company/team collapses when 1/10 people in a team take on a properly planned, scheduled, and deserved time off? 

Personally, I think UPTO is a prettily wrapped scam, one of many that companies are adopting to get more work from their employees without offering the equivalent benefits, time off, or money. Plus, it’s a new ‘perk’ they’re touting as part of their package—and it’s certainly attracting people. 

But even if your leaves are approved more easily than my friend’s, you may soon feel guilty about taking them. 

“With UPTO, workers are not technically owed any vacation days, since there’s no fixed number, and everything must be cleared by the boss on a case-by-case basis. For workers, establishing what the ‘right’ amount of paid time off to ask for often depends on observing the behaviour of colleagues and bosses. If colleagues are only taking 10 days per year, asking for more could feel inappropriate.”

Guilt, honestly, is an easy emotion to exploit. As humans, we bond with nearly everything around us, and somewhere we spend one-third of our day obviously becomes a huge part of our lives. So much so that it’s incredibly easy for work culture to make you feel guilty for wanting to rest, enjoy, or rot on your free days. The concept of continuous, always-on productivity has done much to damage how we view work and rest and what’s more important between the two. 

What’s in it for them (the companies)?

Most companies want to make the most profit while spending the least amount of money possible. They will continuously exploit loopholes, pitch attractive-sounding but actually dangerous benefits, and work hard to ensure you don’t stop working — until you’re expendable. 

Another example of these loopholes is companies calling for a return to working in office. Everyone praised the ‘work from home’ benefit for 2-3 years, but as soon as companies realized they were losing control over their employees, they called for a Return to Office (RTO). The biggest companies advocating for this RTO are those who’ve leased buildings to other companies and risk losing money if people continue working from home. 

Presented without commentary: 

JPMorgan Chase: Unveils plans for a new building in New York that will house up to 14,000 employees. 

Also, JPMorgan Chase: People in leadership roles need to come to the office 5 days a week, or they’ll be punished². “Everyone should be able to work five days a week in the office. Staff on hybrid schedules that they were required to be in the office at least three days a week.”

To force people back, companies are drawing arbitrary geographical boundaries — if you live XX km away from the office, you can work from home, but otherwise, you’ve gotta come in 4 times a week for ‘team bonding’ (which is just drinking shitty coffee and venting about the one coworker who everyone in the office hates). 

All this to say, companies only spew hot air about creating a good work-life balance for their employees. And no matter how much you try, you cannot carve this out for yourself. You cannot quiet quit your job to have a healthier relationship with work. 

“Quiet quitters are hard to handle because they continue to complete their assigned workload to the same (often high) standard, giving their managers an uneasy feeling but nothing specific to complain about.”

Can management folks hear how fucking absurd they sound? Completing your work to a high standard is now called quiet quitting — and despite all this, you’ll be first on the chopping block if the company has to ‘restructure’ with all the funds they’ve raised. 

I also think it’s important to touch upon the double standards with work-life balance. My friend’s company is headquartered somewhere in Europe, where the laws protect employees quite firmly. There, people who are in similar positions have a limited number of holidays, and they are not only encouraged but also mandated to take them. That’s anywhere between 20-30 days paid time off each year. 

But this isn’t applicable in countries where the law doesn’t mandate that employees receive at least an X amount of paid leave annually. Other than the US, this is most likely to happen in developing countries where folks are already underpaid, overworked, and forced to return to the office in harsh commutes. 

When companies offer UPTO, they hope we won’t realize that they don’t have to pay those who leave anything because there are no accrued days. No paid time off can be encashed at the end of the year/employment, and when you consider that they’re not as receptive to approving the leave anyway, it’s a lose-lose situation overall. 

“An unlimited PTO policy is inherently unfair. A few people will take many days and most will only take a few. Folks also miss out on an earned benefit while they work for a company and again when they move on to a new opportunity. Since those in an unlimited PTO organization do not accrue any time, they are typically not paid out for that earned time if they leave the company.”

It may seem appealing when the recruiter tells you that they offer UPTO as paid time off, but it’s a good idea to ask them just how many days on average the people in the office actually take off in a year.

P.S. Sorry this is a couple of days late; this week has been seemingly endless yet incredibly busy at the same time.

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If you liked this issue (or like the newsletter in general), feel free to buy me a coffee or two!

Cool stuff I wanna share with you this week!✨

• Required reading on work & work culture: Workplaces are not family; you can't balance work & life on your own; stop feeling guilty about taking a vacation. 

• Haven't read many articles online but I have finished 1.5 books. Highly, highly recommend Sophie Irwin's (A Lady's Guide To Fortune Hunting; A Lady's Guide to Scandal) and Emily Henry's books (Happy Place, Funny Story).

• Please listen to: "Come back to me" it's been on repeat for me all of this week.

• Choose a cup.

• Were you blessed by Mother Nature last week? Did you get to see the pretty aurora lights on your skies/phones? Here, we got a dust storm that alluded to three (3) drops of rain that never did make it to my corner of the city.

We did get a very pretty sky afterwards, though!

Thanks for reading! Please hit the heart below or drop a comment if you liked it (helps more people find this newsletter + gives me a serotonin boost). 🖤

1. Without that leave approval, we can’t book or plan anything, and you already know the visa folks need an iron-clad itinerary and confirmed flight tickets that cost a pretty penny. 

2. Asking another adult permission to go on holiday, being ‘punished’ at work, — it all sounds so incredibly shitty that it’s a wonder we haven’t stepped back and tried to figure out a new way to work already.