It's because of Eve, eating from the fruit of the forbidden tree while on personal leave.
It's ok Heebie! Your ungrateful brats will spend much longer than you living in a post-Trump world!
The extra part that stings is that I recently found out that my male colleague who is in the most similar position to me got various course releases when he was at the equivalent stage of his career to when I was having babies. My chair is convinced that he can't handle much work and cuts him breaks from time to time.
I had a similar experience to LBJ -- a (male) colleague was given a year off (with full pay) to finish his dissertation, while his women colleagues are expected to teach full loads and still produce research.
I'm especially annoyed because I personally got gigged by the dean on this most recent faculty review for not doing "enough" service. This is even though I am serving on one of the worst committees on campus, one that takes up hours of my time every week, and most of the male faculty who are of my rank serve on zero committees.
Four months after our last kid, and two weeks after I burned the vacation days I had saved up for the whole year so I could stay home with her for a month, our employer said, "Oh, actually we should offer some leave to fathers too."
FWIW, those of us immediately behind you really appreciate it when you channel the stinging anger into raising hell and getting a fair policy. But it totally sucks to have to have dealt with the bullshit and not be the beneficiary of the solution.
Conversely, I was pleasantly surprised last year when I marked my time card for vacation to deal with arranging my father's funeral. They had me change three of the days over to Bereavement Leave.
I have to admit, that it felt like a pure piece of goodwill--it's not like anyone who's shopping for a job is going to ask for your company's bereavement package. (Plus, that's probably a warning sign if you ask about it in the interview anyway...)
SP - contact your state rep about this! A bill for paid leave passed the MA senate last session at the last minute. Nothing happened in the House, because DeLillo thought gambling was more important. My employer doesn't offer any paid leave at all. Well, doctors sometimes get it at the discretion of their medical director.
But there's a new bill again.
Raiseupma.org has good info.
Anyone in MA, please contact you representatives. it would be an insurance model, like unemployment is.
Speaking of interviews, my first one (the remote one) for this position is in a little more than an hour. Wish me luck!
(I'll try not to ask about bereavement leave).
( actually in little more than half an hour... Coffee maybe?)
I'm not saying you have to liveblog it. I'm just saying you should think about where your priorities lie.
Yay, Barry! I hope it goes well. One thing that gave me a huge amount of goodwill toward the company I have to work for another week still is the generous leave they gave for a foster placement regardless of whether there was going to be an adoption. You could have eight weeks I think for a new child once a year, though I only took it twice. (Nia moved in during the summer after her kindergarten year and went right to day camp.)
You maybe shouldn't burn them quite as sickly as that.
I meant that with genuine respect and affection. Their severance is not half bad either, thank god. It's just weird to be stuck in between now.
Oh, here's an ethical dilemma (but not really)- I was entering vacation time in our system and noticed that I was accruing at a rate of 25 days a year instead of the 20 days it was supposed to be. I'm in year 9, we get 20 days a year until we've been employed 10 years then we get bumped to 25 which of course no one ever manages to use up because Americans hate themselves. It appears I got moved up a year early due to some glitch. Should I tell HR? I probably won't end up using the extra days anyway, the only way it would matter is if I left for another job this calendar year, they'd owe me some extra money for the additional accumulation.
Seduce the youngest HR manager, murder the board and their children.
Time for a beer.
It's 37 days here. From year one.
17: Don't notice. Fuck it. Capitalism exploits labor. Unless you seriously think your organization is doing so much good for the world that this extra $2 will go to make someone's life much better.
Use all vacation days, you must.
When I was at Oxford, I think I got about 46 days a year. Might have been 47. That included public holidays, though, and i had to take a week at Christmas as we were closed. But that still let 30+ days to take whenever I wanted.
Current place is a much more pathetic 25 + public holidays. We got some free extra days at Christmas, though. We also get a lengthy paid sabbatical at 5, and then 10 years of employment.
re: 4.1
That seems as legally actionable a piece of sex discrimination as you can get. What was the justification for it? Or was none given?
None is given. I believe we're supposed to pretend we don't notice.
We don't have tenure here, just year-to-year contracts. This has the effect you would expect on people's willingness to cause trouble.
24.last that sucks
37 days not counting public holidays. With holidays it's 48.
Thought experiment for the US commenters: if you could have 3 extra vacation weeks (and encouragement and support for taking them) in exchange for severe restrictions on Internet use at work and slightly increased productivity expectations, would you take the deal? I think I would.
Is 26 the norm in countries with more vacation time than the US?
Depends what your job is, I guess. I don't have time for the internet during the day really. This year I think I have 37 days annual leave, including public holidays. Goes up at 5 years (i.e.in four and a half years!).
My internet is usually restricted at work, for no additional compensation.
Tell me about it! With my first child, I had to take a 30% paycut to drop back from 3 classes to 2 classes spring semester ( she was born 12/23 right before the start of the semester). I had a c section too!
22: I get 29, but 9 are statutory holidays. At 5 years it gets bumped up to 34 days, but there's no regular sick time. Only something that kicks in after you've been out a week. To cover a 3 month leave completely, you'd need to take no more than a couple of days off a year for about 3 years.
Also, there's the truly shitty loophole I learned about FMLA. This only applies to the birth of a child, not medical illness, but the rule is that if spouses both work for the same employer they can take only 3 months between the two, whether paid or not.
This is why I feel so strongly about the bill to put forward paid family leave. And I work for a big employer that could afford to offer it,
My hypothesis was that u.s. workers goof off more at work because there's less stigma attached to showing up and slacking than to requesting vacation time. Chronic understaffing may also play a role... There must be loads of data on this. I myself am way on the pathological end of underperforming, although it has improved, so assume I am an outlier.
IDP, you should openly read books at your desk, obvs.
I'm hoping that every two page spread of the magazine is a side-by-side comparison of a person and a book. "This is Jen's friend Linda, who is jealous of her success and constantly undermines her. She also flirts with Jen's husband. This is Memoirs of a Geisha, which - while problematically orientalist - is a well-written and critically acclaimed account of life as a geisha in early 20th century Japan. Also it will never make backhanded compliments about your new dress. Verdict: BOOKS WIN"
(Book always win, obviously)
35: "a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke"?
http://www.bartleby.com/364/31.html
My solution for a monitored work place is to just have a decent data plan and never hook my phone up to work WiFi. I can't be as grossly abusive as I was during the early years of Unfogged, but I never worry about someone looking over my virtual shoulder either.
36: the Edwardian precursor to the Stranglers' "Golden Brown" and that whole rock genre of addiction-as-lover, no?
38: nice. Except I'll never be able to hear that song without thinking of Rory Bremner's version. "Never a smile, always a frown, that's Gordon Brown."
I'm up to 25 days a year of vacation (awesome by American standards, pitiful by civilized-world standards), but my main constraint these days is that my wife's only got 15 days total. So I have ~10 vacation days a year where realistically all I can do is get stuff done around the house, which isn't that compelling.
You could go somewhere by yourself.
With the small kid around, that's a lot less palatable. "Hi, I'm going to disappear for a few days, so you get to do all the childcare logistics! Oh, right, and you have to take comp time/vacation hours to make both ends of the day work."
Traveling to Lincoln is a popular choice for father-child outings.
Absolutely. Father-child outings needn't be boring: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lone+wolf+and+cub&t=ffab&iax=1&ia=images
37: I've used social media, especially the account where I post mostly stuff related to what I work on, using work computers/networks, but never unfogged or a lot of other blogs that I'm just personally interested in. I kind of miss not being able to connect via phone.
I guess I'd have slid towards using the phone a lot at work, but at the beginning I barely did, except on breaks or at lunch. But then I changed jobs and in early on in the new job I had weak computers that would take hours to do something things, and also crash if I tried to do more than one thing, so after reading through a lot of work documentation I finally started killing the waiting time with the phone and then: bad habits.
That's is the worstest edited commnt I written a while.
I carefully edited 47 to look like that.