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It's always worth a shot, but in my experience large employers won't budge one inch on anything except salary.
It's really frustrating how there's a (somewhat) clear path on how to increase your salary, but time off policies seem to cap off at about 4 weeks. A 10 year slice of your career might take you from $40K to $100K, but you might only have added one week of vacation time.
My experience has been that they won't ever give you more than someone with the same years of experience has for a given level, pretty much ever. But esp. if changing jobs within the same industry, as an example - you have 5 years experience at Company A and have moved from accruing 2 weeks per year to 3 weeks per year. If you go from Company A to Company B, Company B may give you the same 3 weeks off that someone who has been working for 5 years at Company B gets, rather than starting you off at the 2 weeks that someone brand new to the company gets.
Not always of course, but it never hurts to ask and as jamiecta pointed out, many people don't even think to ask.
But yeah, overall, most employers have a cap on the maximum days off you can accrue, however long it takes to max out that cap. My current employer was pretty fast in terms of moving through their tiers and after 6 years, I had 2 weeks longer than when I started. But that's it, I won't ever increase my accrual rate above what it is now. It's not bad, over 4 weeks per year, and we can accrue up to 30 days on the books, so if you want to plan for an extended trip, you can do that. So I'm not really feeling deprived of time off, but still seems kind of odd that I could be here for another 20 years and never get any more time off than I do right now.
I'm starting a new job soon and just read that employees are required to use Paid Time Off (PTO) on all holidays.
This seems unusual to me as most places I've worked give you New Years, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as "free" days off that don't require you to use vacation time.
Is this common?
Depends on field or company. If it is operating on holidays such as health care, restaurant or retail it makes sense. It only doesn’t make sense if the building is closed on that day. I work in health care (therapy). We have choice of working the holiday, taking PTO day, working the Sunday before, or the Saturday after.
It's always worth a shot, but in my experience large employers won't budge one inch on anything except salary.
It's really frustrating how there's a (somewhat) clear path on how to increase your salary, but time off policies seem to cap off at about 4 weeks. A 10 year slice of your career might take you from $40K to $100K, but you might only have added one week of vacation time.
It really depends on the company and industry. I was able to successfully negotiate an additional two weeks vacation at an F500, for a total of four weeks. Holiday, sick and personal were in addition to that.
I now work for the state, and vacation is not negotiable for anybody. That doesn’t bother me though, as it is a generous leave package
I wouldn't say it's common. But yes, there are some employers that include all time off in the PTO bucket including days that are typically considered holidays. In a lot of cases, they do include extra days - so if the intent is to have 10 days of what most people would consider vacation day, they give another 5 (or whatever number) of days to cover the typical holidays.
It's true that hospitals and other organizations that are open 365 days a year have to factor that in to how they handle PTO for their employees. But just because you have a particular model at your employer doesn't mean that all hospitals and hospital systems handle things the same way. I work at a hospital and while some people do have to work to cover the holidays, we still get 6 paid holidays a year. Individual departments manage coverage for those days. I believe the people who have to work that day get paid overtime or some other accommodation, but I'm not positive because my department doesn't have to provide that coverage so we are just closed (as a department) on those days.
And as for sick days, I think your employer is very out of step with many health care industry employers. We get 100 hours of sick leave a year, and are encouraged to take it, to prevent exposing our patients to illness unnecessarily. I think at some point, you need to provide a doctor's note, but I know I've been out for a week at a time (post surgery) and I don't think I even needed a note for that.
I think this is the case at the hospital system my daughter works for. I've heard her mention using PTO for holidays, even though she works in outpatient and her department is closed for major holidays. I know it's all PTO. I do know too that when she had the flu last winter, there was no problem with her taking 5 days off (plus the two weekend days).
Quote:
Originally Posted by RamenAddict
My father was first a university employee who got 22 vacation, 13 sick, and 1 personal day each year on top of the holidays. It switched to salaried exempt with no set holidays and billable requirements. Everyone rotated holidays to make it fair. However sometimes they had people who were fine covering a holiday and it was no big deal.
IME, that's pretty unusual. Generally no one wants to work on Christmas, even if they belong to a religion that doesn't celebrate it, or to no religion. Ditto Easter (if you work at a job that is open on Sundays). At least that's the way it was at the places I worked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jamiecta
agreed. I mainly mentioned it because a lot of people just dont think about PTO being negotiable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fishbrains
It really depends on the company and industry. I was able to successfully negotiate an additional two weeks vacation at an F500, for a total of four weeks. Holiday, sick and personal were in addition to that.
I now work for the state, and vacation is not negotiable for anybody. That doesn’t bother me though, as it is a generous leave package
Yes, I was going to respond to jamiecta about government jobs, but you beat me to it. No negotiating with them, even a small local health department.
I worked for a California university that closed down between Christmas and New year's. We had the choice of taking those work days as vacation (and getting paid) or as unpaid time.
There is a benefit to the employee of carrying sick days as a separate bank that can accrue perpetually.
I had the max of 480 hours sick time and when 50.5% of the company sold all 480 hours vanished... don't get me wrong... I am glad I never had to use them.
Three senior managers/department heads saw this coming... each used ever sick day and all vacation pay through the sale and on the day they were to come back called in saying they quit...
We even had put up welcome back banners to welcome... later I bumped into one and she said there is no way in He!! I was losing 480 hours... and she and the other two got every minute they had on the books.
Last edited by Ultrarunner; 11-16-2018 at 08:03 PM..
I started a new job a month ago in a hospital and they have the same policy of taking PTO days for holidays. My department is not open on any of the major holidays, yet I have to use my PTO time. I don't like it at all.
We do have the option of not using PTO and not getting paid... a few have done this because they were saving PTO for vacation... they did not want to lose paid days when they could elect not to be paid on a Holiday... this way they have more vacation days.
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