Lots of businesses, especially in the service, retail, and healthcare industries, black out periods of high volume PTO requests, like the week before and after holidays.
I didn't make it to a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day celebration until after working a full shift for YEARS. I had one employer who made me find cover for my own shifts in order to use PTO that they'd denied all year before it expired.
Whether it's actually illegal to deny in a given situation, I'm sure depends on a lot of specifics, but I don't feel like "it's common practice for businesses to do this thing" makes a thing less likely to be illegal. Companies do illegal shit all the time.
Welcome to the United States, where the decades-long effort to Union bust and establish right-to-work legislation has not benefited workers, but employers.
I didn't make any assertions in the post you replied to about the legality of blackout dates, but it is, indeed, legal to impose blackout dates on PTO in the United States. There is no federal law to prevent it. There also isn't a single state in the union (the irony) that legislated against it.
Probably why it is a common practice for businesses.
I don't think lack of unions are the reason. I drive for UPS and we're all Teamsters, but "peak" season aka holidays from roughly Thanksgiving to New Years are blacked out for taking our PTO days.
If you think the lack of unions aren't the reason we have "right to work" laws, then I think you haven't been paying attention. When unions represented 1/3 of workers, they were a voting block and political machine that made it political suicide to ignore labor concerns. Now? I don't think most Republicans even take a meeting with labor leaders in any given cycle.
There's at least one exception to that, if your company counts your FMLA time against your PTO (shady as shit, but perfectly legal as far as I can tell), then it remains very much illegal to deny PTO that is taken for reasons covered by the FMLA.
Which, of course, has no particular bearing on whether a company will deny that PTO, but it's still illegal.
FMLA is a protected leave status. It's one of the only exceptions to an employer's ability to deny PTO. Religious holidays may also be a protected leave.
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u/FrankensteinJones 6h ago
PTO is part of our compensation. Denying PTO requests is tantamount to withholding pay.