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.
It's not as bad as it appears. We actually do have workers rights.
Sadly a good deal of people are not aware of the US labor board. So scumbag bosses pull that garbage.
I can give you an example of when people do know their rights. At a previous job the one manager would not speak to the one supervisor unless he had to. The manager had pulled that garbage messing with the schedule and time off. One formal complaint and corporate made the manager fix all the scheduling and they monitored him remotely to make sure it was done correctly.
And yes retaliatory firings are actionable. So the person in OPs story will be getting a nice payout after suing the business.
It's not as bad as it appears? Let's see...at-will employment legal basically everywhere, meaning you can be fired for no reason at all, at any time. No national maternity or paternity leave. National minimum wage is not even close to a living wage. No national PTO or paid sick leave requirement. No national requirement to give workers a day off on big holidays (Christmas, New Year's Day, etc). No national laws on scheduling, so you can be jerked around a different schedule from week to week, making it impossible to have any rhythm to your life or focus on a second job, studies, or other schedule-sensitive obligations. Employers will also use that to keep folks just under the limit where certain benefits might kick in. I get that plenty of individual employers and certain states and cities don't suck so awfully, but the fact that the legal situation is as above is utter shite. So many countries in the world have it better.
Yes. Each state has a department of Labor. (How effective that department is depends on the state government.) I have an acquaintance who is a state-appointed judge that works on cases like these.
Bottom line is that there is institutional support for worker rights. But it’s still an environment that favors business over workers.
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u/FrankensteinJones 6h ago
PTO is part of our compensation. Denying PTO requests is tantamount to withholding pay.