In many parts of Europe, it’s common for workers to take off weeks at a time, especially during the summer. Envious Americans say it’s time for the U.S. to follow suit.
Some 66% of U.S. workers say companies should adopt extended vacation policies, like a month off in August, in their workplaces, according to a Morning Consult survey of 1,047 U.S. adults.
Which gets into an entirely separate (though related) issue, where workers with children get benefits and accommodations that childless workers don’t.
Sometimes it’s overt and blatant like in your case, others, it’s more limited to interactions and relationships.
A few jobs ago, I worked in a small office where the owner was good about approving PTO, but didn’t want more than one person in any given dept out at the same time (ridiculous, but that’s how he was).
I planned a vacation of a long weekend one summer and got my PTO approved in like February for this long weekend in June.
Literally 3 weeks before, this lady I worked with tells me that I “need to reschedule my PTO”.
After looking into it, I learn that what’s really going on is that she wanted to take a week long vacation with her kids since they’d be off for the summer, and one of my days overlapped with the week she wanted to take.
I refused, saying that my friends and I had already made arrangements.
And then she blew it up, in the office in front of everyone, and told me how I was being so rude and mean and inconsiderate, that I could go and do things whenever I liked because I didn’t have kids…and that I “just didn’t get it” and could never possibly understand how hard her life was because I didn’t have kids.
I assumed that my boss and other coworkers would see how ridiculous she was, but while they mostly kept quiet, the ones who did speak up actually did think I was being unreasonable for not canceling my vacation to trade with her, seeing my plans as less than hers, just because she had kids.
I learned to get comfortable with coworkers thinking I was an asshole, though, and enjoyed every moment of that getaway.
Workers with children should get benefits childless workers don’t. They need them.
Rescheduling of PTO shouldn’t happen tho. That was on your boss to catch and mitigate.
The ideal baseline of all workers should be plenty adequate for everyone, regardless of marital status.
And yet workers with children need, at minimum, things like FMLA
I do not agree that everyone’s baseline is or should be the same.
Why should only workers with children get FMLA? Why can’t someone caring for their parents get the same?
That’s what GP meant.
I don’t know about giving extra benefits to workers with children. Certainly, workers with children should be given what they need to have a healthy work/life/family balance but I don’t think workers without kids should be denied those same opportunities just because they chose to live their personal life differently. I think workers in the same role should be equally compensated with all of the same benefits and opportunities which then can be utilized as best suits their personal situation.
I don’t see how a worker without kids is harmed here. This seems like a “I dont feel like we should kick puppies” argument - no one is insisting we kick these metaphorical puppies
They should all get the same amount of benefits, though possibly differing in kind.
Having children nowadays is a choice, not something beyond people’s control (like a disability), and people shouldn’t be getting extra rewards from work for making choices which have nothing to do with work.
It would be massivelly unfair to those who made a personal choice not to have kids to be de facto discriminated against because of that.
It’s not unfair. Your benefits include bing significantly wealthier and having more free time. Flexible time off for children isn’t some unreasonable ask.
While I agree that flexible time off for children isn’t a big ask, it’s disingenuous to say that childreee people are somehow not deserving of those same accommodations because they have more money and free time. First off, you don’t know someone’s personal or financial situation. They could be helping to support their aging parents or something. And second, it’s a choice to be a parent or not. If I go out and buy a Bugatti I don’t therefore deserve to have some special treatment from my job. And while kids are obviously more important to accommodate than a lot of other things (like cars, lol) they don’t somehow make the parents extra super special because they have a FaMiLy. Everyone has a family!
Reality is everyone needs those kinds of accommodations sometimes and employers should realize that employees are human with lives outside work.