Most companies already do this anyway. This year is one of those instances. We also get the day after New Year's off. As for recognized holidays in the company, if it falls on a Saturday, we get Friday off. If the holiday fall on Sunday, we get Monday off.

Yep, but US Federal employees didn't have Dec. 26th off until 20 days from now, so they're probably a bit happy about that. About time the Feds caught up with the generosity of most other employers.

No doubt there's some cost-benefit issue here. A lot, if not most federal employees would end up taking paid leave that day anyway- also, being a Friday, a significant number (including my wife) already have the day off as part of their 'compressed' schedule. It probably ends up saving money to just keep the whole works closed.
Nevertheless, I expect the Republicans to declare this some kind of unauthorized amnesty and threaten to sue and impeach.

Edited the title a bit. I think it reflects the probable Republican talking points better, now.

DECEMBER 26 IS NOT THE BIRTHDAY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR! OBAMA CONTINUES HIS JIHAD ON CHRISTMAS!

It's the final stage of his eight-year plan to subvert America with death panels and taking away your guns.

You fools! They warned you, and you did nothing!

Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!

I used to work in FedGov and what used to happen is that they wouldn't give the day off until the day of the holiday and anybody who used PTO had to keep it used.

At least on one occasion the person receiving notice formally in the department was genuinely on vacation time and they wouldn't release people until a few hours after the day started.

This is less stupid really since it's impossible to use as much PTO as they grant at the level they are paying people for most people. But the day off is nice.

Can you explain the PTO scheme? just curious. I've only ever worked a salaried job with generally lax requirements around Dr. visits and suchforth. I've seen differences with vacation accrual of only being able to take time earned vs you can use up your full allotment Jan 2nd if it suits your fancy ( you will have to repay if you quit early though). It sounds more like you have to earn time off for every leave of absence?

In civilian fedgov you accrue like one day of PTO every two weeks or something ridiculous at start which yields about a month off. It actually goes up from there until you've been there like twenty years and then you get almost three months a year off, because the rate of accrual increases. If you use PTO you cannot accrue PTO from PTO use, and you can't have more PTO than about 100 days I believe - more than that just goes away. It's possible to get an agreement with a manager to extend that to 200 days, but it basically requires the manager admitting you can't go on PTO because he's an idiot and doesn't understand operational redundancy.

Anyone who works in an organization that dysfunctional for twenty years imo deserves three months a year off. But, they don't really pay enough to make use of it. Most of the senior staff would take months off at a time and spend time with their kids or whatever. A few used to do crazy shit like climb up mountains and into volcanoes and etc.

In my current private sector job I get a month of PTO at the beginning of every year and usually have 1.5-2 months laying around in total because I don't have time to take off - but I have all the money in the world to go places. vOv

Can't win. Haha.

My wife has been a federal employee for about 22 years. Just to clarify the numbers- her accrued annual leave time (they don't use the term PTO, at least at her agency) actually amounts to around 26 days- which is about max. I believe a small amount can carry over if unused- she has no difficulty using it.

Your wife is getting screwed on yearly evals. Probably the whole department is. Applications of the system are wildly variable but in departments with cash flow limitations they assign gratuitous leave instead of cash incentives for as long as they've been on continuing resolution for salaries - e.g. The last decade, the last "raise" wasn't even matched to inflation.

The GS rules allow all kinds of freedom in retaining employees with leave increases and managers in my old department at least liberally granted leave under those rules to stop people from jumping ship.

Just wondering when you left federal service. Cash incentives and 'gratuitous' leave as bonus compensation are pretty rare these days in federal gov, if they even still exist at all- sequestration pretty much killed it off a couple of years ago. Sure, once upon a time she got such rewards regularly, but that's all in the past (She's still getting promotions, so her evals can't be too bad).

2009. Not so far back. As far as I hear from my former coworkers nothing has really changed though.

I'm guessing you worked for DOD or another well-funded agency. Not so for the Mrs.

For the record I think the lowest pay grade I ever was in fedgov was GS-11 (I was technically a GS-9 for a few months maybe?). The job offer that would've continued my tenure was SES (senior executive service, shorthand for you get paid too much) which is pretty much well regulated you can have whatever you want on a balance system of PTO and income. I declined to take that job because it was in DC with lots of travel to Denver and it was all politics and yelling at people.

Paid Time-Off abolished the traditional days they give you every year and sick leaves. With PTO, you have to earn the hours per year. Your vacation and sick days are deducted on PTO. Say you get paid every 15th and last day of the month (24 pay periods), and the company is generous and starts new employees with 10 days (80 hours), you accrue 3.33 PTO per pay period.

On my first big job, they started me at 8 days PTO. I was salaried, but the project client we supported pays us by the hours we worked. I was paid 1.5x on overtime at the lowest level. When I got promoted a year later, they removed the 1.5x on overtime, but still honored it. They also increased my PTO for the year from 8 days to 10 days. However, since I was in the solutions division, they don't roll over my overtime to PTO. They pay my overtime on that pay period or I can request compensatory time. Except on recognized holidays, my work week needs to be 40 hours. If I were in the consulting division, they would have honored my overtime and use it as PTO.

The limit was 25 days even for managers. If you were a manager in consulting division, you get lots of overtime rolled over to PTO. They rollover PTO, but max is 120 hours. They have a PTO gifting program for these situations if you can't take time off at all. Also, when I started, my starting salary was half the starting salary of consulting division employees. It was crazy. Unused PTO upon leaving the company is paid in full.

For my mom's job, they are traditional and start employees with 2 weeks vacation leave and a separate sick leave (5 days). They have no cut-offs on rollover. She has coworkers with 6-7 month vacation leave.

Federal government still counts sick days and vacation days separately. They get something like 10 annual paid sick days in addition to accumulated leave time.

Looks like it's not a Federal. It's agency dependent.

Just to set the record straight- all civilian federal employees are subject to the same system regarding vacation and sick leave. The two are considered separate- I did err though in the estimation of annual sick days- they are accrued in a similar manner as leave/vacation days, just counted separately:

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-administration/fact-sheets/annual-leave/

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-administration/fact-sheets/sick-leave-general-information/

People who end up with months worth of leave are probably just rolling over the hours they didn't take over the years.

Oh OK. That's actually pretty good. I'm not Federal, by the way. The companies I worked for support gov't projects.

Self-employed here. I get 0 paid sick days and 0 paid leave days.
PTO? I actually had to look it up, never heard the term before this post.

Thanks all. When I changed jobs I went from ~6 wks of vacation + 10 stat to 3 wks + 8 stat ( I think). no idea about sick leave because I've never had to be out more than a day. Overtime is not a concept in my role(s) - you get paid a flat rate if it is 40 or 60 or 80 hours a week you work (I'm not silly enough to do much more than 55). Time in lieu at manager's discretion, but typically that would be due to intercontinental travel over weekends / holidays.

Hmm, not sure how far reaching this is. I'm a US federal employee, and I'm working a 24 hour shift starting 9 am the day after Christmas. But you know, good news for my local mailman. But in previous years, I've had that day off.

Exceptions may be made “for reasons of national security, defense, or other public need.”

So, depending on your job (which you may or may not have to kill me if you tell me what it is) you may not have the day off.

TSA should take the day off of putting their hand up someones ass. Its not like that agency has done anything to stop terror.

And given that your shift is 24 hours, I'm guessing that you don't work at the DMV or anything.

If you end up working that shift I expect you'll be racking up a lot of comp time.

This upsets me so much I'm posting semi erotic pottery

Spitting Image Bumbledown


Since I don't seem to be able to get the SELINK tag to jump to a specific time in a video, it's very important to jump to 16:55 in this video.

Holy Christ, those caricatures are horrifying. -I mean, they're well done seem to be high budget puppets, and would look fine as drawings. But molded in 3d, and especially on a human actor's body without (very) cartoonish voices, they just look disorientingly surreal, like some terrible creature.

That hadn't occurred to me. I guess I must be as desensitised to Spitting Image puppets as I am to hardcore pornography. My only problem was that while the production values improved, the quality of the humour and satire declined in the post-Thatcher period. They were partly responsible for British politicians becoming blander and less easy to caricature.

But for body-horror you can't beat Prince eating his own tongue in a hotdog in this Genesis music video, and what looks like Madonna singing out of her vagina.
Genesis Land of Confusion

Yeah, none of the comments on the YouTube video shared my reaction, i think familiarity has a big effect on the uncanny Valley phenomenon.

Thanks for sharing, never heard of the series and what i saw, including the pottery bit was quite funny. I even felt the shudders wearing off during the Genesis vid.

Eighties British satire is like something from the dark ages now. Even most of the 80s/90s comedy power-brokers who worked on Spitting Image (Rory Bremner, Ben Elton, Harry Enfield, Grant Naylor, Chris Barrie, Ian Hyslop...) have declined into obscurity in the gulfs of time. And quite often it was just mean-spirited rather than satirical or funny. It's easy to forgot that celebrities are people too. Still, at the time, the only thing worse than being on Spitting Image was not being on Spitting Image.

Spitting Image - My God Is Bigger Than Your God

I work for IBM and the day after thanksgiving and Christmas(if that day is a Friday) are not company holidays.

It is assumed however that the personal days they allot you are used for these and some IBM sites are given the leeway to give the day off.

For those of use who work in the field, we just say "fuck you" and take it off with out accounting for the day anyway.

Wait - Boxing Day isn't a holiday everywhere? How can you enjoy (or whatever you do) the Saturnalia knowing you have to front up at the Cunt Shop the next day?

Never really been a "thing" in America, at least as far back as I can remember. Also, we tend to savo(u)r the use of the word "cunt" for special occasions so as to preserve the heavy hit of it.

These are just some of the wonderful traditions we have in the United States! Come visit so you can be confused in a more obese setting!

It's a shame that people have to work on Chairman Mao's birthday (12/26).

I read that as "Christmas Mao's birthday"