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You really think they aren't tracking the vacation time an employee takes? Of course they are! It would be foolish not NOT track it. And what one person deems reasonable (I think 4 weeks per year is reasonable for my position/years of work) while someone may find that too much/too little. And don't think they don't look at those things when deciding on things like promotions and raises. It happens even at "good" companies.
Uh, it is not crazy in a lot of industries. In healthcare, you have to plan around major holidays. Many docs and nurses will even talk among each other to decide which holidays/times are more important to have off and they request them far in advance in order to lock in the dates. This isn't even an unusual practice, I've seen plenty of people plan far in advance if there are special dates they want off.
Given many of those organizations don't have time cards, don't record when employees show up, when they are working from home vs are at the office, etc., yes, I think many of them legitimately don't track vacation time.
They leave it up to the person and their boss. An HR department never sees what times people are even at work. My job now doesn't have an unlimited vacation policy, but if I simply didn't show up for a week, my boss wouldn't notice, as long as work was getting done. They legitimately don't know or care when I show up, provided what's expected of me gets finished. Everyone starts by being monitored, once you prove you are responsible, you get more freedom (also, we can work from home whenever we want). If I were to abuse the policy and just not show up, or work from home for weeks on end, I'd lose the privilege. That's the point of policies like that, your management trusts you won't abuse it, and you trust your boss has your back.
If you work for the kind of company that abuses employees, policies like this won't work. If you're the kind of employee who tries to squeeze as much as possible out of your company while doing as little as possible, you won't last under these kind of policies as well. So, as I said in my first reply in this thread, unlimited vacation policies are very good if done well, and are bad if done poorly.
1: lacking any controls : UNRESTRICTED
unlimited access
2 : BOUNDLESS, INFINITE
unlimited possibilities
3 : not bounded by exceptions : UNDEFINED
the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy
— Sir Winston Churchill
I'm using the first definition, unrestricted, with no limits.
At least on our planet that's what it means. Here, on our planet, words mean things.
Maybe you're not speaking English or you're from another dimension where "unlimited" means something else.
But I'm talking about here on planet Earth, using the English (US) language.
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I'm not sure what you think is false advertising
You apparently have a problem with false advertising laws. You don't think there is any such thing as false advertising and approve of false advertising.
I'm using the first definition, unrestricted, with no limits.
At least on our planet that's what it means. Here, on our planet, words mean things.
Maybe you're not speaking English or you're from another dimension where "unlimited" means something else.
But I'm talking about here on planet Earth, using the English (US) language.
You apparently have a problem with false advertising laws. You don't think there is any such thing as false advertising and approve of false advertising.
As I said before, you seem to be going based off what you think the title alone should mean, not the actual policy itself. Your argument is as logical as claiming Olive Garden is using false advertising because it's not a garden made of olives.
Given many of those organizations don't have time cards, don't record when employees show up, when they are working from home vs are at the office, etc., yes, I think many of them legitimately don't track vacation time.
They leave it up to the person and their boss. An HR department never sees what times people are even at work. My job now doesn't have an unlimited vacation policy, but if I simply didn't show up for a week, my boss wouldn't notice, as long as work was getting done. They legitimately don't know or care when I show up, provided what's expected of me gets finished. Everyone starts by being monitored, once you prove you are responsible, you get more freedom (also, we can work from home whenever we want). If I were to abuse the policy and just not show up, or work from home for weeks on end, I'd lose the privilege. That's the point of policies like that, your management trusts you won't abuse it, and you trust your boss has your back.
If you work for the kind of company that abuses employees, policies like this won't work. If you're the kind of employee who tries to squeeze as much as possible out of your company while doing as little as possible, you won't last under these kind of policies as well. So, as I said in my first reply in this thread, unlimited vacation policies are very good if done well, and are bad if done poorly.
Not having time cards doesn't mean your work time isn't track. AS I said in a previous post, flex time and flexible schedule SHOULD be much more common than they are. But, not tracking vacation time is poor company management. For legal purposes, documentation is important. It has nothing to do with whether people are responsible adults or respectful or good worker.
As I said before, you seem to be going based off what you think the title alone should mean, not the actual policy itself. Your argument is as logical as claiming Olive Garden is using false advertising because it's not a garden made of olives.
My example was going to be that your employer provides "unlimited" water for your use at work. Doesn't mean you can back up a tanker truck to your workplace and take 25,000 gallons home to fill your swimming pool
As I said before, you seem to be going based off what you think the title alone should mean,
No, I just speak English and words mean things.
Something you disagree with, because you're speaking some foreign language where words mean something else than what is under discussion.
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not the actual policy itself.
The actual policy is a fraud. False advertising.
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Your argument is as logical as claiming Olive Garden is using false advertising because it's not a garden made of olives.
Olive Garden is the name of a restaurant and a trademark. "unlimited vacation" is not.
This is beyond comparing apples and oranges. You're comparing apples and pumpkin pie.
Again, you're not even trying to address my point.
Had you used a fraction of percent of logic, you would have used the comparison of a company hyping their minimum wage of $70K for all full time employees, with "full time" defined as 100 hours a week, when in reality, full time is defined at 40 hours a week (or 29 in the ACA).
Such an example is still false advertising in hyping their "minimum wage of 70K"
Not going to name any names but I interviewed with a non-profit organization in the area here that had unlimited vacation as one of its benefits.
During the course of the interview, I learned that there was a lot of covering for others while they were out (not too big of a deal for me) and that the company culture was pretty different. I was taken on a brief walk-around through the office and there was a guy sleeping at his desk and nobody seemed to be concerned. Another woman was sitting on a table typing away on a tablet explaining that she was writing fanfiction, and the director of the place was allowing people to slack while people were waiting/phones were ringing.
I found out later that the unlimited vacation was creating quite a lot of problems since there were quite a few people there who were taking advantage of it and also were not scheduling in advance--just calling off and announcing they were taking vacation. Oh, hell no. They wouldn't have liked it if I had accepted the HR job there, lol.
My example was going to be that your employer provides "unlimited" water for your use at work. Doesn't mean you can back up a tanker truck to your workplace and take 25,000 gallons home to fill your swimming pool
lol, exactly. There are people on this forum who simply try to troll to manufacture outrage where none exists. Everyone (including them) knows how absurd they are being.
Interesting discussions here about whether "unlimited vacation" is properly named or not. I have also contributed my views concerning this.
However, in looking at the full picture, the facts remain that under an "unlimited" vacation policy, employees that resign from their jobs don't get a final unused vacation payout, and existing employees who cannot or won't take any vacations during a given year also cannot cash out on their unused vacation time because it is "unlimited". That is something that benefits the company, not the employees.
It can be argued that the upside for the employees is that the vacation time is "unlimited" so that employees can take off a heck of a lot more vacation time. But then again, just like in the example from another poster about filling up with thousands of gallons of the company's "free" water is ridiculous, so is the concept of taking a ridiculous amount of vacation time. I suspect that even taking off a week every month is too much, so the employees are left with taking off about the same amount of vacation time (or less) as when there was a traditional vacation limit schedule in force. Oh, yeah, but without the unused vacation payouts as discussed above. Clearly, the company benefits from this "unlimited vacation time" policy, whether the conjured up "unlimited" moniker is appropriate or not.
At Federal Government jobs, it's pretty close to having unlimited vacation without much issue. It's not unlimited but they always seem to find some excuse to be take extra time off.
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