So, okay. Today the company bigwigs -- like big-big, people at the central office out-of-state -- announced that they're putting just about everybody in the company on a mandatory vacation the week after Christmas and running every office on a skeleton crew. Everybody's going to have to take 40 vacation hours whether they want to or not.
Now, by my count, there are four classes of people as far as vacation time.
First is the people who never take a damn vacation and have a shit-ton of hours saved up that they never use. Now, for them, this is a boon; they get to take a paid break and not worry about too much stuff piling up while they're gone.
Next rung down is the people who only have a week or two of vacation saved up. For them, this is an inconvenience; they're forced to use a week's vacation here, and that's going to impact their vacation plans for the rest of the year.
Next rung down is the people who don't have 40 hours' vacation saved up. This kinda sucks for them; they're going to have to make up those hours later. (Someone on the group mailing list commented that that doesn't sound legal, but on paper it's optional and they can work that week if they want to. I am given to assume that it's much less optional in practice.)
And on the bottom rung, you get the temps. For us, it's a week of mandatory unpaid vacation. Now, okay, a week's mandatory unpaid vacation right after Christmas is a kick in the dick in and of itself, but adding insult to injury is the fact that we're entitled to a paid holiday on New Year's Day -- but only if we work at least 20 hours that week.
This strikes me as quite possibly the worst management decision I have ever seen, which is really saying quite a lot. I know the temps are (at least theoretically) expendable, but I think this is going to hurt morale for all but the top rung of people I've mentioned. And it's just bad business sense to piss off a bunch of people and then give them a free week to go look for another job RIGHT BEFORE THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR, which is quite possibly the easiest time to get hired.
My immediate supervisor is trying to go to bat for us; I've pointed out that UPS still runs during that week and they're still going to need us to process those packages. Even if we could pull down, say, 20 hours that week and 20 the next, we'd at least get our paid holiday (which I don't think even costs the company anything, I think that's all on the temp agency's dime).
Anyway. I am almost done with my first beer of the evening.
