Not what the Los Angeles Times is encouraging.
Bad bosses are always on the hunt for ways to profit at their workers' expense. Bad bosses who don't want to be thought of as bad bosses often try to package their cutbacks as positive for workers, with "flexibility" being one of the big buzzwords of such efforts. Workers aren't supposed to notice that they don't
get to be flexible and take time off when their lives call for it, they
have to be flexible and work extra when their bosses demand it.
The Los Angeles Times is going into this in a big way with a new vacation and sick leave policy that pretends to be generous but is really a way to steal workers' accrued vacation time and pressure them to take less time off. When a worker leaves a company, they get paid for the vacation time they've accrued, and LA Times workers have banked a lot of days, pay that would come in handy in case of the layoffs that so many newspapers are frequently making these days.
Well, the new ownership—Tribune Publishing—has found a way to trim this cost, while also giving managers a new hammer to hold over the heads of harried newsroom staffers. Starting January 1, staffers will no longer be able to bank vacation—because they won't automatically earn or be entitled to any vacation, sick days or floating holidays. To get any time off, a reporter or editor will have to go to a supervisor and make a case "subject to their professional judgment and to the performance expectations of their supervisor that apply to their job." In one stroke, vacation time and sick days become a management tool to monitor and reward or punish performance—or to favor the yes men that plague the Times' organization—and crucially, a way to get that expensive banked vacation off the books. That's because if a staffer succeeds in getting permission to take time off, he or she first has to use any banked time to pay for it. So the company's financial burden gradually lessens. [...]
Any spinmeister who tries to say this is about allowing more time off or "flexibility" is lying to your face — if the big boss wants to give you a bonus of more paid time off now, he has ways to do so. Under the new blanket policy, to get any time off — say, to have dental surgery or for a sensitive family issue you don't want to talk about in the office — a staffer will have to sell a supervisor who may have his own performance pressures from above. Or who may not like you. Or who wants to send you or his bosses a message.
Putting workers' vacation time—or dental surgery or family leave time—completely at the mercy of a supervisor has echoes of attacks on teacher tenure, which seek to put teachers' jobs at the mercy of whether their bosses like them. And both are all part of a much broader shift from workers having some stability, some ability to predict how much vacation time they get or what hours they'll be called on to work, some due process protections if they speak out, to workers being made very aware that they are always at someone else's mercy, that being anything but compliant and always available to work through a vacation could lead to the loss of a job, because someone else out there is desperate enough to take those conditions.