When it comes to vacations and PTOs, employees should be given what they deserve, but that doesn’t always happen.

In today’s today, an employee at a nonprofit organization narrates their experience with their new director who drastically reduced their vacation benefits.

They had no choice but to comply, so all of the employees worked together to use their vacation days in a malicious way which  significantly affected the organization’s revenue.

Check out the full story below.

Have to clear out our vacation time? Good luck keeping the place open with no employees.

I am a social worker with a moderate-sized nonprofit compared to the city we are in.

We serve individuals with disabilities in a variety, including onsite and in the community.

This person described their former executive director.

About a year and a half ago, our executive director retired after 15-ish years.

They were an awesome person.

But due to age and some health problems, they had kind of checked out on running the organization.

Meet the new director of their NGO.

The new director came from a much larger for profit organization, and seemed to feel that money is king.

And the only way to be respected is to be feared.

She was a monster in every sense of the word.

They loved their vacation benefit.

Now, being a nonprofit, our pay isn’t fantastic, and the benefits aren’t stellar.

But the one thing they were good at was the vacation roll-over.

We were allowed to keep 200 hours of roll-over.

And while it took some time to build up, those of us that had been there a while tried keeping our hours somewhere around there.

This is our vacation and sick time put together.

But their new director made some changes to it.

New director decides that our entire vacation policy is too generous.

She cuts our accrual rate (I personally lost almost 2 full weeks a year).

And the major kicker, she tells us we can only keep 80 hours of roll-over.

They didn’t learn about the vacation policy changes until October.

Again, I get it, COVID hit us hard.

Everyone has to be expected to make some cuts somewhere.

But the problem is, she told everyone this the first week of October, and we had to be down to 80 by January 1st.

Anything over 80 just goes away.

They tried negotiating, but to no avail.

We tried negotiating. We tried offering alternatives.

We asked for exemptions by a few months.

She would absolutely not hear it and finally said the next person who asked about our PTO policy would be walked out of the building.

So, my coworkers and I came up with a plan.

So, they filed for vacation leave over the next several days.

Enter the compliance.

I will admit, this only worked because the rest of our administration team felt the director was horrible.

And they lost their PTO time, too.

We all put in for vacation at the same time, even those that really didn’t need to because they were closer to 80 hours anyway.

The majority of the workers are on vacation week after week.

We literally had 85% of our staff off for weeks at a time.

We worked it out amongst ourselves that we had just enough staff to ensure work was done to keep us compliant with the state, but anything above and beyond that ground to a halt.

I also need to clarify that we are not an emergency service, so the clients we serve did not lose out on essential supports.

The board started asking the new director why the the revenue dropped.

Well, our board meeting comes around in December, and the new director has to try and explain why there was such a drastic drop in revenue over the last month and a half.

Apparently, she didn’t give a good enough answer because the board started talking to the employees and SR management for the first time since the new director came on.

When they were asked, the employees answered honestly.

Let me tell you, we did not hold back.

After hearing the horror stories of some of the other stuff she was doing, the board promptly decided that having her in charge was (according to the all staff email that got sent out):

“Not going to lead us in a direction that would lead to long-term success and stability for our organization.’

They had a new director again who’s so much better than the previous one.

They kicked her out to the curb.

I am happy to say they found a new director who has already gone above and beyond what we could have hoped for.

And our staff and, most importantly, our clients are hopefully on the path to many years of success.

It sounds like their malicious compliance paid off.

Let’s check out what others on Reddit have to say about this.

Yes, indeed.

This user shares their personal thoughts.

Here’s another honest opinion.

Funny but true!

Finally, let’s end it with this valid explanation here.

This is why workers’ unions happen.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.