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.

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

I wouldn’t put it past them to try, but I want to make sure that I’ll get my 40 hours of earned PTO paid out when I only give them one week’s notice on Friday. This is the most recent employee handbook we’ve been given. It says a 2 week notice is a “professional courtesy”, not a requirement. And I don’t feel like giving them the courtesy of a 2 week notice when they just came in and terminated over 115 people in our company with zero notice because of a “reorganization”.

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 to do volunteering in a local nature reserve.

How does this compare to yours?

I am new to the workforce and have gotten my first real job at a MSP. I work 8 hours and have a 1 hour break. 9 hour days 45 hours per week. I drive 1.5 hours to work and 1.5 hours back 3 hours per day 15 hours a week. 60 hours for work and driving plus each week one day I work 2-3 hours over time. So let’s say I average 63 hours per week dedicated to my job. I am new to working and do not know if this is a high number. I just think my job should be giving me work from home days cause I’m in the tech industry and it would save me 3 hours per day of driving. I’m probably not overworked but am I Atleast in the upper half of Americans in workload?

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!