Working in a workplace that almost seems to be full-tilt all the time is exhausting and can lead quickly to burnout if you don't pace yourself. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the environment, pacing yourself isn't really an option. In places like this, you're technically able to take leave, but the reality is that you're never going to be able to since there always seems to be something going on. Your place of work is always "too busy," "understaffed," or "It's the wrong season." When the reality is that your employer just needs to hire more staff but is reluctant to.
This is especially true when you have a certain amount of irreplaceable knowledge of the business that no one else seems to be able to get right—that or everyone else who knew how to do the tasks has left due to high turnover and burnout. You might hope that if your skills make you so unreplaceable that you couldn't even take time off, you'd be getting paid to reflect that… but chances are you probably aren't.
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This is brutal in industries like retail, where you're essentially prevented from taking leave during the holiday season because it's the busiest year of trade, thanks to everyone who is out shopping for presents.
Of course, if you haven't been able to take your leave, the silver lining is that you'll get paid out for any PTO you haven't taken when you leave. Right?.. Well, no. That's not always the case, and it depends on what the laws are where you live and what your employer's policies are—and how closely they follow those policies.
This is something that this kitchen manager appears to be learning the hard way in a post that they shared with this online workplace community. In the account of events that they shared in their post, they detailed how their boss had repeatedly made excuses as to why they couldn't take leave through the year, but once the New Year hit, when the manager asked to roll over or cash out his leave, he was told that the policy was “Use it or lose it.”
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