A few states, like California and Montana, essentially codify the property-right view of vacation by outlawing use-it-or-lose-it policies. (Companies with use-it-or-lose-it or strict rollover policies must exempt workers in those states.)
Such laws protect workers from effectively being deprived of vacation days that are difficult to use during the year only to have them expire at year’s end. But these laws may also subtly discourage vacations by making them easier to redeem for money or put off indefinitely.
“To me as an advocate, you should be able by law to keep unused vacation time,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, an employment lawyer at Gupta Wessler. “But I’m not sure that creates a good incentive.”
To that end, a number of companies, many in the tech industry, have seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to make sure their workers are decompressing.
In the spring, the software company GitLab responded to a significant rise in hours put in by its more than 1,000 workers with so-called friends-and-family days, in which the company shuts down to discourage people from logging in. Google, Slack and the software company Cloudera have started similar policies — none of which count against workers’ paid days off.
Automattic, the maker of the website-building tool WordPress.com, has gone even further, encouraging employees who work together to coordinate their vacations as a way to eliminate friction that discourages breaks.
“We’ve been experimenting with entire teams taking time off simultaneously,” Lori McLeese, the company’s head of human resources, wrote in an email. “We’re hoping that this may reduce the amount of ‘catch up’ work employees typically return to after taking a vacation, making their transition back less stressful or overwhelming.”
Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/business/economy/vacation-days.html
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