Is it ethical for an employer to force its employees to take vacation time? [closed]

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manpreet Tuteehub forum best answer Best Answer 2 years ago

 

My company, like most every other company, has a published list of paid holidays. In December, the only paid day off is the 25th. Last year, everyone was notified that the office would be closed the entire week of the 25th and that we would be expected to use vacation time for the 21st-24th.

This struck me as unethical, since we are given a set number of personal vacation days in a year, but some of those days are basically pre-allocated to this week when we are forced to use four of them. I could argue that the company is either being disingenuous when hiring employees and stating that they would receive X vacation days (they should be saying X-4) or I could argue that the company is overstepping social boundaries by surprising its employees by taking away vacation time that an employee may have been planning to use for another purpose. Am I in the wrong for thinking that if a company wishes to close its offices voluntarily (e.g. not due to financial issues, natural disaster, etc.) that they should "eat" the loss and essentially create bonus vacation days for that period?

When speaking with friends, I learned that other companies do this as well and some people saw it as normal and others were as flummoxed as I was. This is not a question about a specific company or policy, but about general business practices, ethical HR policies, and managing employee expectations.

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manpreet 2 years ago

"Is this ethical" isn't a question that can realistically be answered. Different people (and thus different companies) will have different opinions.

If most people historically end up wanting that week off, closing the entire office and telling everyone to take vacation can be the more ethical approach. If the office is open and people are allowed to work, then you need to ensure that some number of people are around to cover all the job functions that need to be covered. You can't have all your IT folks on vacation, for example, if other people want to be able to work. That may lead to lots of vacation requests being denied (formally or informally because some unlucky person gets told that he has to cover the day after Christmas) and cause lots of unhappy people. If only a handful of people want to work that week, it may be more ethical to tell that handful that they have to take their vacation days rather than forcing lots of people to work when they'd rather be on vacation.

Of course, you'd want the company to announce that sort of policy in advance so that people can plan appropriately. If people already had non-Christmas plans for their time off because the change was announced at the last minute, that's obviously unfortunate. But it's also probably understandable if the conversation that lead to the policy change started when line managers started getting vacation requests and started grumbling about needing to ensure minimal staffing levels.


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