More than a million British workers not having a single day of paid time off, says TUC

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/sep/08/more-than-a-million-british-workers-not-having-a-single-day-of-paid-time-off-says-tuc

by topotaul

16 comments

  1. I’m honestly not surprised by this. In a couple of the last companies I worked at, it was expected that if workload was high (which it always was) you would work over your lunch and even after work. All unpaid.

    It was never official or actually spoken about obviously, but it was very clearly expected.

    And that was an office job. I can only imagine what it’s like in smaller establishments.

  2. this tracks. i work in an office building as admin staff and thankfully am in a department with a manager who’s very chill, but one of the other departments has a manager who refuses all time off requests and low-key threatens to fire people if they demand their legal rights be met. one of the managers works unpaid overtime on the weekends pretty much every single week and STILL hasn’t managed to have a day off in over a year.

  4. It’s gotta be way, way higher than that I work in construction an industry that employs about 2.15 million people and I’ve never had holiday pay in my entire career.

    The majority of people are on the CIS scheme which means you’re self employed but without any of the benefits of being self employed.

    No holiday pay, sick pay, pension contributions or any other employment rights.

  5. Makes sense, especially with many offering to pay out holidays. This is especially true of agencies because if you landed a good gig and got offered plenty of overtime, you could abuse the way agencies pay holidays (usually something along the lines of average pay over so many weeks) to get the most value out of your holidays.

    I think I may well have contributed to this on a technicality a few times too… We’ve got this whole rota thing going on, we get a PTO allowance over the rota, but we’re paid it out over the year regardless of whether we use them (they’re basically just a means of saying we’re not available on those rest days under any circumstances unless otherwise agreed)

    So there’s definitely been a year or two where I’ve used none of them, but it’s not as if I’ve missed out on having those days off anyway. In fact, it works out in such a way that I could rake in hundreds of hours of overtime over the year and still come out with more weekdays off than I would on a normal 9-5 with holidays. I suppose in those years, I’ve technically not had any PTO in the usual sense (we’re paid when we’re off work anyway, but it’s basically for hours we’ve already worked/will work), but I’ve not actually lost anything either.

    Many others might be in similar situations where they don’t really loose anything and/or don’t need to days off and opt to take it in pay for some extra money. Thus leading to some more extreme examples where some don’t take any PTO, but they’re also no necessarily any worse off for it either.

  6. Try working in education – this sort of shite has been going on for decades. Everyone else is striking and quite successfully sealing deals for adequate pay and whatnot. Meanwhile, educators are being fucked, constantly/consistently by the general electorate that keeps voting Tory, the Tories themselves and the teaching unions.

    Just imagine that your actual boss (the parents/guardians) is instructing your employer (in the contract) to actively fuck you over.

  7. Wage theft is the most prolific crime in the UK. Has been for only ever.

  8. I have a permanent full time job, with a fixed annual salary. I never considered myself to be being paid on the days I take off. I always consider my pay for the days I do work to be spread evenly over 12 monthly instalments.

  9. One of the biggest issues is how many companies will give you shit for taking time off. I think most people have worked for that place where they’ve put in time off well in advance of when it’s due to be taken, their manager has just not bothered approving it after several reminders to do so, and at the very last minute, said manager has come up and tried to coax the employer into moving or cancelling their PTO.

    I also once had a manager who deliberately would wait till the last minute to approve PTO for employees he didn’t like as much, and then approve PTO for the employees he liked more, even if the other person had booked it long before, rejecting it with the excuse “we can’t have you both off and I’ve already approved their PTO”

    PTO needs to be treated as a right. And if it’s going to be rejected, the manager should need to provide a written and detailed reason for the rejection. Said reasons should include the initial date the PTO was requested, and if it’s being rejected for someone else to take the PTO, the date their request went in.

  10. Quelle surprise.

    What next, the TUC demanding an end to rampant modern day slavery in towns with high ethnic populations?

    https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/10/we-cant-eat-we-cant-feed-ourselves-leicesters-garment-workers-have-had-enough-2023

    https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/19051015.147-modern-slavery-trafficking-crimes-recorded-single-year-bradford/

    https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/24115276.charges-modern-slavery-east-lancashire/

    No, just tumbleweed.

  11. Here’s another thing people don’t account for. How many people take their holiday for time off? I have not taken a single day off this year for fun, or relaxation. I’ve taken days off for my PGCE lectures, or because I have a staff meeting fort freelance job. Or because I have some people coming to fix my balcony so I need to be in. Essentially I haven’t had a holiday at all this year, and won’t until I get to Christmas. I imagine there are many, many people who use their holiday on ‘life admin’ rather than fun or relaxation 

  12. We need to as a country encourage trade union membership. This is literally what they are for. Right wing hate rags like the Daily Heil and Torygraph like to paint the picture that trade unions hold their members hostage in some sort of a militant style coup against the government.

    The reality is, these rights like annual leave were won by unions and they are best placed to protect them. It isn’t always about pay rises. Union membership alone is enough of a deterrent for an employer to know they should not even think about ripping their employees off by forcing unpaid overtime or not allowing holidays.

    My partner unfortunately works somewhere where they have to fight tooth and nail to get a holiday request approved, usually after 10-20 attempts get refused. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t unionised.

  13. I work in a small team of supervisors for a large national infrastructure company and I haven’t been able to take any of my annual leave days since 2021. They let me carry them over to the following year (we’re normally only allowed to carry over a maximum of five days but my manager ‘made a special exception’ for me – how generous!) but I‘ve now lost all the 2022 days and it looks like I’ll be losing all my 2023 days on 1st January too because I haven’t been able to take any of them either. We work shifts and do on-call to maintain continuous 24/7 cover for an aspect of the company’s operation. Me and my colleagues do a shitload of overtime each week and are still drowning in work. It’s just not possible to take annual leave.

    *Edited to add* I’m aware this is technically illegal but my boss, his boss, their director and HR just aren’t interested.

  15. I’ve not had any real time off in years but then I’m running my own IT support company and that’s just how it is. I try and take bank holidays where I can and I like the look of how Christmas fails this year. I do make sure my Staff member that is in our shop takes his dinner (we close to make sure he gets it, which often gets comments form customers) and I also make sure he understands that while yes if he has time off it gives me more to do (his words not mine), it’s important he takes it as it’s what he’s entitled to and more importantly it’s well deserved. But the pressure to keep working comes from the customers, I’ve been asked over summer, so many times if I had any time off by customers who left things to the last minute and just increased my work load rather than letting me plan anything out. We are updating our terms to give more set time frames, because while it was not a problem to start with as we’ve grown it’s become more of a problem.

  16. I work 90 hours a week. Get zero break ..get called in on my days off ..and I do 4 people’s worth of jobs. I’m fucking done with it

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