Moral Suasion

In 2009, FluxCorp instituted a mandatory vacation policy whereby employees were forced to take their entire annual leave on specific company-determined days. While such shenanigans are OK in the free-market world of the US, here in socialist Canuckistan, where labour laws are a little tighter, this sort of random pronouncements are illegal. So we banded together here in our little satellite outpost and organized a little (tiny, really) revolt, and we won (kind of). I documented this tiny little episode back in an April 2009 post titled V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N Part Trois. This policy, not unexpectedly, was rather unpopular amongst Fluxees worldwide; thus, it was revoked in 2010.

However, a bad policy never rests on its laurels. It's making a comeback in 2011 disguised by upper management as friendly advice, or even polite suggestion. Management has asked us to please use some of our vacation days in Q1 of this year to lighten the vacation backlog as to make the finances look prettier on paper. Of course, using your vacation days is purely "optional" (*wink* *wink*). And oh, any vacation days taken should not impact the progress of any project. Thus, we are nudged (elbowed, rather) to use our vacations, but our progress cannot slip, meaning that we must put in overtime to make up for the days that we took off. Sounds like a great plan to lighten the finances.

It's also a bit of déjà vu. When one of my former employers were nearing bankruptcy, it cut the pay of all its engineers across the board by 10%, telling them that the official work week has been shrunk by 10% -- Fridays were now officially half-days. In the same e-mail, with no sense of irony, it states that engineers are expected to continue to work unpaid overtime in order for the keep the project moving without delay. Half-day Fridays, yeah right. Why doesn't management just come out and say to everyone that there's going to be a 10% pay cut and leave it at that? Why play these stupid obviously-transparent word games of a shortened work week? Don't they know this whole charade make them look like patronizing dickwads (or wankers, for our British readers)? Good thing I had left the company by that time, but just in the nick of time.

But a better analogy is when this same company asked us to buy shares into the failing enterprise. Of course, buying shares is purely "optional". We even had to sign a waiver saying that we bought these shares "without coercion" (alarm bells, anyone?). The "optional" part, as we found out soon afterwards, means "optional if you don't care about getting fired". A large round of layoffs soon followed this optional share purchase. Those who didn't exercise their "optional" right to purchase worthless shares bore the brunt of those layoffs. I bought shares -- $5000 worth. That was the recommended amount. I looked at it at the time as a pay cut and I was right. Two years later, I got a bankruptcy notice saying that my $5000 in shares can now be redeemed for $68.22.

So if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and take some optional vacations. Don't worry though. I'll keep blogging here and at Engineer Blogs. After all, progress cannot be delayed just because of some pesky vacation days.