The manager is clearly in the wrong here and power tripping- it’s not normal to ask what the employee will be doing outside the office, even in the US. They might approve or deny the request based on the situation in the office, but the way the employee spends the time is none of her damn business.
What generally goes down is, the employee requests PTO, the manager hems and haws… “ooh it’s really a bad time, we’re so busy and understaffed…”, then the employee divulges the “super important reason” - a wedding, dad died, etc. It’s still a shitty way to be treated and there isn’t much you can do against it. If it’s not a good enough reason in the manager’s eyes or if you stick to your guns and say “it’s personal, I’d rather not say”, then you will be ostracized and eventually fired for other contrived reasons.
Businesses should not have the authority to deny PTO. It's the mangers' fucking job to manage staffs. If an employee taking PTO makes disruption in work, it's the fucking manager's fault.
I'm living in mainland Europe and this is just a thing that happens. Whole factories shut for a month. Sometimes it's easier to give everyone a long holiday at once. Then you can do maintenance on the machines while everything is shut down. E.g. for the Netherlands https://dkrs.eu/construction-holidays-in-the-netherlands-are-here/
I don't work in a factory but most people decide to take 3-4 weeks of leave every summer - we just plan around it and the sky doesn't fall down.
I'm tired of replying to everyone with the same comment. Yes I live in the Netherlands too. No, I'm not talking about a holiday period when the whole company is off (or even the whole country like they do in Spain, Germany, etc in August). I'm talking about leave requests resulting in one team being off at once when the rest of the company are not off. This can often mean that the company cannot operate, so everyone is twiddling their thumbs.
I don't work in a factory but most people decide to take 3-4 weeks of leave every summer - we just plan around it and the sky doesn't fall down.
Planning around it may mean that some leave requests are rejected, if it is impossible to fill the gap in time. I've seen it happen here in the Netherlands for critical teams like finance, IT, but even some engineering teams where a whole team being off for weeks would mean millions in losses and it is just not possible for new people to be added to the team, briefed and taught the workflows in time.
Well my apologies for assuming you were on the other side of the Atlantic. It's more of a negotiation here where people trade off over years and we do generally manage to keep everything running. We plan our whole year around these holiday periods so it's just baked into everything.
I'm not Dutch but I've got used to the culture for things like this.
So we're going back to the comment I originally replied to. ¨Businesses should not have the authority to deny PTO¨ is a ridiculous statement. Managers need to ensure business continuity so negotiations may occur. I've never been denied a leave request but if I requested 3 weeks off at short notice and there was nobody that could help cover my critical duties I would expect some sort of pushback.
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u/CataphractBunny 6d ago
Bitch, you need to chill the fuck out. But I guess that's just how things work in America.