If It Ain’t Broke…
I worked at a company that gave out exorbitant amounts of vacation. Anyone who worked there for 25+ years received 8 weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of personal time. This was a family-owned company, but rather large. We ran three shifts totaling 250+ people. Enter Jimmy. Jimmy was a grizzled old man. He started at the company when he was just 20; now he was 63 and gave absolutely zero cares.
Jimmy also knew how to make a specific part for our product, just him and one other higher up in the office. One day, the plant owner comes out and announces he’s selling to a corporation. He’s older and ready to retire, but he promises that there will be very little change and wishes us all well. Nope, wrong. The new company comes in and immediately goes after many of the great benefits we had.
The first thing they do is cut everyone’s max vacation down to 4 weeks, and do completely away with personal time. Anyone who’s maxed out had until December 31st of that year to use it up, and they wouldn’t pay it out. They then go into the office and clean house, firing anyone who’s close to retirement. Including Jimmy’s back-up guy for the part he makes.
But they also do away with one very important rule: You no longer have to get vacation approved, you can just call in and take it. Jimmy is furious, and they know it. They also realize he’s the only one in the building who can do his job now. So they hire a new kid for him to train, most likely to permanently replace Jimmy when the time comes. So Jimmy does what anyone would do.
He calls in the first training day for the new hire and lets us know he’s going to use all of his PTO at once, and promptly takes 10 weeks off. We had a back stock of parts he had made, so it wasn’t too unnerving. But for 10 weeks, Jimmy went and applied to other jobs, found one, and started. Fast forward 10 weeks, and it’s the day Jimmy is supposed to return.
He doesn’t. For two days they try calling him, and even go to his house. He’s nowhere to be found. Finally on day three, he calls and resigns, and they lose their minds. The parts he makes are specialized and patented by the original founder, so you can’t just hire someone off the street to make them. What eventually happened was they had to contract the original owner to come in and teach some new hires how to make them.
When the original owner found out what they had done, he got furious. The last I heard he charged them a seven-figure contract to teach them how to produce the parts, and they had to pony up or close down. Moral of the story: don’t mess with people’s vacation time or retirement funds.