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Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

> The loss of vacation days — which is equivalent to a fine

No they are not equivalent. There is a reason workers fights so hard to get vacation days, they are important and money is not a substitute.

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There's some equivalence, if this is actual paid vacation, that is, vacation time that must be paid out in dollar terms if not taken, and is an actual form of compensation that can live on a balance sheet. In some such employment situations, it's common to "bank" lots of this time, to be paid out in cash periodically, or on retirement.

To the employers they are roughly equivalent, to the employee they are certainly not equivalent.

My experience with people working under these kinds of arrangements is that they absolutely do think of their PTO in monetary terms, and manage it with an expectation that most of it will be turned into money at some point, and that anyone past the first couple years on the job has quite a bit "banked", so that "fining" them some PTO isn't preventing them from taking time off, but is taking (future) money away, and the employee would understand it in those terms.

Do you have any evidence that it is uncommon to take your vacation days, or is this just a bunch of anecdotes about workaholics? Vacation days wouldn't be a thing if workers didn't care about using them.

I take it you don't know many government or union workers? What evidence do you want? Find one and have a conversation with them. You'll discover that this is common in most any workplace where PTO converts to actual dollars. Much of the private sector, and especially tech, doesn't operate under that kind of system, so it wouldn't make sense for those workers to do it, but in ones where it does it's definitely common to bank some fraction of one's annual PTO with the expectation that it will become money, at some point (often retirement). It's not at all unusual for mid-career workers in those work situations to have several months of PTO so saved.

When you're negotiating, it's useful to keep in mind not just your own viewpoint, but the viewpoint of whoever you're negotiating with.

They probably get paid out for unused PTO (common in US) and I would guess a very small number ever use up their vacation time, an exceedingly difficult thing to do in any American job outside of tech (and maybe even for a lot of tech workers).

So taking away vacation days from those people would be literally equivalent to fining them the payout of their days wage.

Most US jobs don't allow you to accrue unlimited unused vacation time. Police, at least where I live, are allowed to. You often hear stories of large six-figure payouts on retirement, from years of accrued vacation time.

> [snip] I would guess a very small number ever use up their vacation time, an exceedingly difficult thing to do in any American job outside of tech (and maybe even for a lot of tech workers).

It is? Maybe I've just been very lucky in my jobs- even before I was in tech, when working night shift stocking shelves at Walmart or doing customer retention at a call center, I've never had a problem using PTO. I'm sure everyone's experience is different so I'm not saying you're wrong, just that this is a surprise to me.

Depends on the company. It isn't unusual for some companies to have a few key people who can't take vacation because nobody else can do their job. Large companies like WalMart have learned that you dare not have such people (they can die unexpectedly - maybe you can stop them from quitting but death doesn't care) and so take effort to ensure everyone can be replaced as needed and so time off isn't an issue. Smaller companies often haven't learned this lesson and so will sometimes have people who can't be allowed to take time off.

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