The worst part of it is, employers, thanks to sustained flat wages, can now use the ‘recession’ to justify manipulating scheduling to the point where they can effectively control when employees can take take their vacation time. “Business is slow right now, so we will shut our business down every other Friday during golf season. You can choose to use your vacation time or to take voluntary time off.” With most hourly people living from payday to payday, taking a 10% income cut is a serious economic dip.

Apple has, historically, always had a company-wide shut-down between Christmas and New Year. In return for which a few of the more minor public holidays were made optional (you could still take them off, if you wanted, but that would count against your PTO). Overall, it seemed to be fair and work well.

Until, of course, it was noticed that Macworld was the first or second week in January and a huge amount of shit had to get done before that… Things kinda broke down at that point.

It does seem wrong that a employer can tell an employee which days they have to use their PTO for: but from what I hear, it’s becoming all the rage.