Lots of employees will work for overtime pay if it is available. But what if you have to work without the overtime wage?

Check out how this worker made a new policy work for him.

You want to take my holiday entitlements away?

30 years ago when I was only about 20 I worked for a software company. It was a pretty rubbish company.

Their software was rubbish because they’d employ trainees and get them to do the development on it without a senior first checking their work.

Needless to say, the app often had problems.

The software wasn’t the only thing that sucked.

Every other month a memo would go out to all programmers asking us to come and work the weekend, and that any time we work won’t be compensated with overtime but instead we can have the same amount of time off work later with pay (time in lieu).

I never used to take holidays, but due to undiagnosed depression I would often have a random day off as a sick day instead.

One month my manager called me in and told me that there were problems with the software that needed fixing urgently and because we were approaching the end of the year he was talking to everyone who’d had too much time off sick and taking holiday entitlement off them.

I don’t recall the number of days entitlement I had, but after deducting my unauthorized illnesses from my holidays I had only about 3 days left.

I was told the aim was to stop people taking holidays they were entitled to (and would have to take before the year ended otherwise they lost it), thus giving them more work hours to fix the software.

But it wasn’t going to work out that way!

I explained to my manager that I had no intentions of booking any of my holiday and would happily work those days + any additional required weekends (as I often did), but he insisted that this is what he had to do.

I explained to him that I don’t book holidays. I don’t claim my time in lieu and I just have a day off when I am having a bad day.

Ultimately the company gains from this because I work more days than I am paid for and I don’t like them treating me like this way.

I asked him how many holiday days he was taking away and how many days in lieu I was owed.

It ends up being a sweet deal for only OP.

So I let him take my holiday away, leaving me with 3.

I then asked to book those 3 days of holiday off + claimed about 7 days in lieu I otherwise wouldn’t have taken.

Because the rules are that I use them or lose them, right? So now they went from having their lead developer in every day to having to give me 2 weeks off.

Here is what folks are talking about.

I was impressed, too!

Totally agree.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

That’s exactly how insulting this is.

This is illegal in Canada.

Fortunately.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.