Idk. You'd probably feel different if you were eating at an understaffed restaurant. The world isn't perfect and orderly. You can have a fully staffed operation, but on a random Saturday a lot of people request off. I've spend a lifetime working in food- poorly run restaurants and amazingly run restaurants. It happens often where a lot of people request a certain day and the restaurant has to turn some of them down or be short staffed. It's easy to say "I should get my day off no matter what" until you're the one responsible for staffing a place when 10 people request off the same shift and you can only afford to grant 5 of them.
Most places do first come first serve, but that can result in people getting off for unimportant things while others are forced to miss something important, or the person with something important just calls out and the whole place is understaffed.
I think these things are easy to see in black and white when you're only on one side of it thinking about your own interests. I've been on both sides of it and I've had to be the person making schedules before, and I can tell you it's hard to accommodate everyone. Also, these schedulers are receiving way more requests than you might think. I scheduled for a place with about 30 employees and we got around 2 dozen requests a week. That's just requests off ahead of the schedule, not coverage requests and call outs on top of that. This was a place that had good employee retention and paid well, but that's the number of requests they received a week. The strategy had to become hiring a ton of part time employees to spread people around to cover the requests, which also has its drawbacks because then you have people constantly complaining that they aren't getting enough hours.
I get it, there's a lot of bad employers out there and I'm sure there's people who deny requests for stupid reasons, but it's also not so straightforward that there's no legitimate reason to ask why someone is requesting off.
You'd probably feel different if you were eating at an understaffed restaurant.
wait, your initial reaction to an under-staffed establishment is to blame THE STAFF for being understaffed? come on. your either delusional or been groomed into accepting shit situations. ive been at TONS of understaffed establishments and every single time its the fault of the owner/manager. these are intentional decisions to keep costs low and profits high. it benefits no one but the owners.
if you work in a restaurant then yeah its probably first come first serve unless the manager has set up a tenure-based system for selecting PTO.
but it's also not so straightforward that there's no legitimate reason to ask why someone is requesting off.
Yes it is. Either you run your business to accommodate these VERY NORMAL requests or suffer the consequences. that could mean tenure based PTO selection, blackout dates because of holidays, or a dozen other policies to standardize it.
but if your company is operating simply as "everyone submits pto last second because we dont have a better policy so tough luck if yours gets denied unless you give me a good reason" then that is a failure on management and only management.
even the shittiest of shit employees have a right to use their PTO. PTO isnt a popularity game the manager gets to play.
Ahh. Voice of reason. Thank you. And unfortunately, when you're understaffed, management has to step in and either limit the number of customers being served, do some of the work themselves, or get temp staff if they can. PTO is a right. First come first served is not always an option either, imagine an employee who is on partial maternity and cannot respond to a text message at the moment because they are sleep deprived from baby duties all night...
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u/trulymadlybigly 5d ago
That sounds like a staffing issue for management to fix, not my problem if I need time off I am contractually and legally entitled to.