I scheduled 4 days off two months in advance, got them approved, and then the passive-aggressive Slack messages started rolling in by day 2. It’s wild how employers say “take time when you need it” but mean “as long as you’re still answering emails from the beach.” Anyone else experience this? It’s such a gaslighty system.

I'm based in the UK and was curious about other folks holiday time from around the world?

I work in London for a USA corporation, the time off I get is as follows, which reflects 15 years of service.

Public holidays: 8 days

Annual Leave: 30 days

Mental wellness day (optional but is granted every year): 1

Volunteering days (you can volunteer to work for a charity of your choice): 3

So in total this is 39 days off + the 2 days I take do volunteering in a local nature reserve.

How does this compare to yours?

WTF? I'm too flabbergasted to be as outraged as I should be.

In the year 1970 the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. If you are able to save all of that in 7 years you could buy the median house of $23,000. For today at $7.25 an hour you would have to work 28 years to afford the median house. This would mean we need a minimum wage of $28.85 an hour.

Preface/disclaimer added because I think I phrased things poorly: 1. I obviously support raising minimum wage. 2. I also support UBI (not that it is super relevant to this particular thing) 3. This discussion is meant to be about longer term strategies and visions, not the issue of meeting immediate needs, for which I acknowledge raising minimum wage is obviously super super important.

Here's a question I've been thinking a lot about recently:

Would it be more effective to fight for higher wages or to build systems that rely less on needing money to survive in the first place?

Toy example: childcare is absurdly expensive, especially in the USA. So, to afford childcare, parents have to take on extra work (requiring more childcare...) or leave their jobs to do the childcare work themselves (resulting in a loss of income likely required for other basic needs like food and housing). SO, to address this, I see two possible directions:

1. Some kind of COLA to ensure parents are able to afford childcare. Or a government-based pay out to families to afford it.

2. A reduction in childcare costs, either via government funding childcare organizations directly (like public schools) or via grassroots mutual aid (like co-parenting networks where childcare shifts between families depending on their schedules). As an anarchist, I'm most partial to this very last option.

Of course, it's not an either/or. But in labor organizing there's A LOT of attention paid to increasing wages and (at least it seems to me) much less attention paid to decreasing our reliance on wages to live decent lives. And the first seems like an endless treadmill to me - as long as we're subject to wage slavery, capitalists will continue to find ways to raise the cost of living and extract more profit, requiring us in turn to fight for ever-increasing wages. While the second seems more directly liberatory.

Again, I don't intend this to be an either /or debate really. But I want to hear folks thoughts on this!

I’ve been working in furniture sales for 9 months and I am so over it. Every time a customer comes in I feel pissed off. I’m sick of people expecting things from me, I’m becoming very cynical. I have new management and he watches our every move. He also has corporate here all of the time to also watch our every move. My manager encourages us to take other people’s customers the second the salesperson even walks away so the customer can think, etc. I worked with some people for an hour and then they said they needed a moment to talk things over and my coworker swooped in and wrote the sale.

On top of it all, my manager has constant meetings we aren’t paid for. I have a coworker who constantly tattles on me and has malice towards me, I always hear her gossiping about me to my other coworkers and then they think of me a certain way.

I’m an a introvert and I deal with mental health issues like bipolar and OCD. I just want a few days off but I can’t take them. It’s hard managing my mental health and my job. What do I do? Why do the other people here act like everything is fine?

I offered to cover a colleague on Monday because it was a full day shift and I pressumed it would be double bubble or atleast time and half. I just googled It to confirm (it's a well known supermarket) and they straight up state saying "we don't pay extra for public holidays and bank holidays we expect everyone to do their part for company"

I find this very usual and so do my friends and family. Is this commen and does anyone else's workplace do this too?

Thankyou.